WEEK
20
Feed It or It Dies

“Feed the bitch!” said the voice on the phone. “Feed the bitch or she’ll die!”
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential, 2000

I was as nervous as a sinner in the first pew, which may have partly explained the undersized, dense, and misshapen loaf I’d just baked, the least attractive one I’d made in months of bread making.

Zach took one look at it and winced. “Ooh. Doorstop.”

Even worse, one of the four crosshatch slashes had blown out as if a hand grenade had gone off inside, leaving a large tumor on that side of the loaf, while the other three cuts were mere scratches that hadn’t opened up at all. This had happened because my fancy ten-dollar lame was already dull and ready to be tossed in the garbage. If ever I wanted a loaf to turn out well, it was this one, for I was on my way to a weekend with Charles van Over, bread authority and author. I was hoping that van Over could diagnose my airless and tight-crumbed peasant loaf.

I kissed Katie good-bye.

“Dad, what if he tells you your ‘lousy’ bread is great? That’d be pretty embarrassing. What do you say then?”

“I guess I’d feel pretty foolish.” But the odds of that happening were about nil. I eyed the loaf, so sorry-looking I had seriously considered “forgetting” it to save face. But, I reasoned, if you’re going to the proctologist, you’d better be prepared to drop your pants, so, loaf and overnighter in hand, Anne and I headed out to van Over’s home overlooking the Connecticut River.

Charlie greeted us warmly and went right for the bread knife.

“This is very good bread,” he said, chewing on a lopsided slice. “Better than what you’ll get in most bakeries.”

Huh?

“But there are no air holes,” I protested.

He held it up to the window to better see the texture. “Nice. You don’t want air holes in bread like this. A peasant loaf is sandwich bread.”

Oh. I hadn’t known that.

“But it’s too moist inside,” I protested again.

“Leave it in the oven a half hour after baking. It’ll dry out. Bill, I’m serious, this is really good bread.”

I could see Katie smirking in our kitchen a hundred miles away.

“I’m not happy with the spongy texture. I want a much more open, webbed crumb, an alveolar crumb,” I argued, using the wonderfully evocative word I’d swiped from Steven Kaplan—“the Professor” (as Charlie called him)—who’d hooked us up.

“You’re not going to get that with this bread. You’ve gone about as far with this bread as you can go, but now you need to go to the next level. Have you ever used a starter?”

Oh, jeez, a starter. No way.

A starter is a batter or dough of flour, water, wild yeast, and bacteria (in other words, a sourdough, or in French a levain*) that you maintain with regular “feedings” of flour and water for years or even generations. It can be used either in place of or with commercial yeast. I had thought about it a couple of times but had been frightened off by the demands of caring for it. The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain described his baker’s levain this way:

A massive, foaming, barely contained heap . . . which even now was pushing up the weighted-down lid of a 35-gallon Lexan container and spilling over the work table where it was stored.

Then there were worried posts like this to a professional bakers’ Internet forum:

I am wondering what one does during holidays to feed their levain—besides the obvious going in to feed it. We feed ours 2 times a day. The levain is going to miss 2 feedings. I will be sleeping and it can die before I go in to feed it.

Feed it twice a day, every day, or it dies? I don’t always manage to feed my kids twice a day! Who needed this hassle?

“I don’t know, Charlie. It seems like a lot of work.”

“Not if you keep it in the refrigerator.” He pulled a one-gallon recycled plastic container marked “Crème Fraîche” out of his fridge.

“You only have to feed it once a week. I got this from a friend in Alaska who asked me to take care of it while he did some traveling.”

He opened it up. It had an acrid, but not particularly unpleasant or sour, smell.

“How long ago was that?”

“Twelve years.”

I gulped. My neighbors wouldn’t trust me to water their houseplants for a week while they’re away. “I don’t know . . .”

“I’ll give you some to take home. It’s the only way you’re going to bake the kind of bread you’re after.” We had a delicious lunch on Charlie’s patio and returned to the kitchen to make bread (using Charlie’s twelve-year-old levain, of course) in, of all things, a food processor.

“You ever make bread in a food processor?” Charlie asked.

I was tempted to answer in my W. C. Fields voice, “No, and if I did, I wouldn’t admit it.” Food processor? What kind of baker was this?

——————————————

“What exactly does he do?” I asked Charlie’s baker, Skip, at five o’clock the next morning while he formed baguettes in the kitchen of the Copper Beech Inn in Ivoryton. In the early mornings the inn’s kitchen became, under Charlie’s auspices, a small commercial bakery, doing one thing but doing it extremely well, baking a single type of bread (baguettes) for a single client (the inn). Having spent a full day with Charlie, I still couldn’t quite figure out exactly who he was or what he did. Former restaurateur and baker, occasional food industry consultant, author, inventor of the folding bread knife and the HearthKit oven insert (a three-sided baking stone meant to simulate baking in a brick oven), proselytizer, bon vivant, chef, bread authority, tinkerer, Jacques Pépin’s boules partner—none of these really captured the essence of this youthful seventy-year-old who, above all, was passionate about bread.

“Charlie’s a concept person,” Skip said, a smile crossing his face. “He likes ideas. Big ideas.”

His biggest idea to date is that the best way to knead bread, whether at home or in a bakery, is in a food processor, a method he discovered practically by accident when asked to prepare bread for a party honoring the president of Cuisinart. Van Over was so impressed with the result—and the ease of preparation—that he patented the process for commercial bakeries. One would not expect dough subjected to a razor-sharp metal blade whirring at over 1,300 rpm to make good bread or anything else, but I had sampled a baguette the previous night at dinner and thought it among the best I’d ever eaten.

Charlie attributes the technique’s success partly to the fact that the kneading time is short—forty-five seconds—and does not whip air into the dough the way a commercial dough hook does as it lifts and stretches—and aerates—the dough over a ten- or fifteen-minute kneading.

“I thought flour needed oxygen,” I’d asked in his kitchen. “Isn’t that why it has to age for several weeks after milling?”

True, but once the flour is mixed with water and becomes dough, oxygenation destroys the beta-carotenes in flour and can cause the flour to break down, Charlie had said. His explanation echoed the words of the French bread authority Raymond Calvel, the scientist who’d come up with the technique he dubbed autolyse, letting the dough rest and condition before kneading.

In the kitchen, Skip now added instant yeast, water, and salt to the flour and processed it for just forty-five seconds, then went home to have breakfast while the dough fermented. He’d return at eight to make the bread. Later that morning, the baking finished, Charlie came in with a tub of starter for me. He mentioned that he and his wife, Priscilla, were on their way to France in a few weeks.

“Oh, really?” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any ancient monasteries over there that still bake bread, would you?” Brother Boniface, the ancient baker at Mepkin Abbey, might be deceased, but the appeal of his ancientness had stayed with me. “I like old things,” I explained as we stood in the inn’s gleaming, modern stainless steel kitchen. “I think it’d be neat to make bread in a place where they’ve been baking for a really long time, you know, to get in touch with the tradition.”

“I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding one,” Charlie said, adding that, as an atheist, he wasn’t really in touch with that world. “That’s a dying tradition. But I’ll ask around. Do you know Peter Reinhart? He’s written a couple of books on bread, and he’s a former monk or something. He might know.”

Charlie handed over the levain. “Just feed it at least once a week with equal parts flour and water.” By weight, he meant. “Leave it out for a few hours after each feeding, then keep it in the fridge. It’s like having an undemanding pet.”

During the long drive home, Anne kept glancing nervously into the backseat at the starter. I asked her what she was so jittery about.

“Remember friendship bread?”

I almost drove off the road.