Skip to content

bread

Kneading Conference West: day 1

Drove to Mount Vernon, WA yesterday: a long day, but a gorgeous drive through lush northwest Washington. Headed to the first Kneading Conference West, which is modelled on Maine’s long established and hugely popular Kneading Conference. The idea is to bring together bakers, millers, farmers and interested bystanders like myself – writers, home bakers and researchers.

Arrived in time to take a stroll through the orchard and the many lovely gardens at the conference venue, the Mount Vernon Research & Education Centre – herb, vegetable, “water-wise”, Japanese and others. The land is owned by the university but orchard and gardens are managed by volunteers from the Master Gardener program. It was grey and spitty weather and the tables beneath tents in the field looked less than inviting, but we were cheered to learn these were for meals, and most of the workshops are indoors.

As was the first I attended: A Realistic Approach to Making Grain Work – An On-Farm Example. David Mostue turned out to be a riveting speaker: after graduating from architectural studies he returned to a 230 acre family farm and set to repairing and upgrading the century-old infrastructure and rethinking its purpose. It had been started as a pear orchard, but pears are one of the many crops that have become, as he put it, a casualty of international trade and scale: labour is cheaper elsewhere, and they’re a labour-intensive crop.

He spoke well enough to fix a couple of dozen of us to our seats in a very small room for about three hours. He covered the practical issues around making it as a grain farmer, whether large or small scale. He pointed out that grain is a great crop for poor soil and challenging conditions – his farm is in the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon, where temperatures average 95-100 degrees fahrenheit in the summer, and there’s a lot of heavy clay: this means that a crop like winter wheat (so named because it grows through the winter, but is harvested in summer) which can be planted in the fall is a better choice, since clay is sodden all winter and rock hard in summer, so has a small window for planting in spring.

He spoke about the qualities of different wheats – of particular interest to the bakers, and to farmers like him who need to understand the uses to which bakers put their flour. High gluten (protein) content flour, used in industrial baking, needs high soil fertility (often using artificial fertilizer). Artisanal bakers can cope with a lower protein flour (11-12%), because they use fermentation and long risings instead of the large quantities of dry yeast typical of high-speed industrial methods. Long risings, as Andrew Whitley will tell you, give the gluten time to develop and also make the bread more digestible. Lower protein still are soft white wheats (6-10%) that make pastry flour; or rye or alternative wheats (emmer, spelt et al) that are popular in artisanal baking. The highest gluten levels are in durum wheat (his clocked in at nearly 15% last year), used for semolina flour: Mostue had wanted to make his own whole grain pasta, which he found to have an unbeatable flavour and dense texture that made it more fliling than its commercial counterpart.

But of course nothing is simple, and Mostue explained the many other aspects of grain production – preparing the soil (he uses a five year rotation so that he can build soil fertility naturally, rather than using artificial fertilizer), seeding (we learned a lot about seed drills), weeding and harvesting (who knew combines could be so interesting?). He had progressive ideas about marketing the farm and its products, using social media but also building a market by getting people to understand and be interested in the farm; using innovative variations on standard CSA programs (including use of Survey Monkey for ordering), farm dinners… and plenty of wine (which they happen to produce on farm!)

Reluctantly we left for the fruit garden and a cider and goat cheese tasting, followed by abundant pizzas fresh from the mobile wood-fired ovens, and salads of wheatberries and donated vegetables – carrots and beets – that were roasted in the ovens, followed in turn by seriously good cookies from the Breadfarm.

Bread and dirt

It’s been a pleasant summer here at the Iambic Cafe. I’ve recently been on a bread binge, using the nearly no-knead bread recipe

that was featured recently in Cook’s Illustrated – which I always pick up to read on the plane. The bread is refreshingly easy to make, as long as you plan a day ahead (it takes 18 hours resting time plus another couple of hours rising). And this one from the New York Times sounds very easy and convenient. I might start experimenting with levain breads; this blog entry gave me some inspiration.

I also visited a couple of organic farms this week. Local Yokels is a group which provides an acre of cultivation, a cluck of chickens and a well-cleared blackberry trail to groups of children and adults with disabilities for use in therapeutic gardening. It’s a great example of how much can be achieved with very little: there’s a lot of innovation and re-use of building materials, augmented with organic growing practices like micro-drip watering and companion planting. The scarecrow, built by visiting children, is rather splendid.

Haliburton Farm is, thanks to citizen action, city-owned and volunteer operated. I took up tools for the cause

and weeded a patch of golden beets one sunny day. Nasturtiums dressed up one of the fields…

some laying ducks another.

The university has been tending the wetlands area and installed a bat house

and a mason bee house.

Only one of the tubes appeared to be filled when I peered in. The bees lay their eggs in the tubes, separated by their own mini-concrete walls, and when they fill a row they wall up the end, so you can easily see which ones are occupied.

Spain 3: bread and sausage

On our second day in Spain, we headed to the University of Vic, also known as UVic (- and I guess, fair enough, they have more claim to the name than Victoria, which lacks a school of idioms).

On our way across campus, we passed a steely statue commemorating Catalonian poet, the letters of whose name had been picked off the base, so I can’t tell you who it was. But perhaps we can assume a towering intellect?

We had a presentation by a nouveau baker called Francesco Daviva who runs Forn de Pa Altarriba, where for 25 years he has been trying to radicalise bread. He talked about the shape of bread (there are only three: round, baguette, loaf/square), its presentation on restaurant tables, and the various ways of making it divisible for diners. Mediterranean tables seldom have bread plates, so there are issues about crumbs and cutting that quite naturally have to be considered: the sorts of things I suppose bakers used to instinctively incorporate into their work instead of giving a stand-up lecture. Although we passed a few rolls around to look at shape and colour and aroma, we were not offered anything material to chew on, and wandered off for an hour or so before reconvening for lunch in a campus cafeteria. (The bread at lunch was, well, unremarkable.)

It was blistering hot when we followed the leader to our next destination, Casa Riera Ordeix, to see some more sausage-making. Curious emblem over the door…

Fuet, (Salchichon de Vic) the sausage of Vic , has been made for about 150 years in the centre of Vic, run to this day as a family business. This was high quality meat: nothing but prime cuts of pork (well trimmed legs and pork belly for fat). They produce 3000 kg of sausage per week from January to July and then double the volume between September and Christmas, as it’s a product traditionally eaten at Christmas. They have a strictly scheduled week: Mondays they fill the casings; Tuesdays through Thursdays they trim the meat, as we saw:

Fridays they grind and season the meat, which is left to macerate over the weekend. The sausages are hung from nails in aging rooms where the temperature and humidity – much like prosciutto di parma – are regulated by opening and closing windows; the local flora of course play a part in the curing.

The sausages are brushed and re-hung periodically until they have done their two to three months’ stint. The product was absolutely delicious: spicy and peppery, firm and chewy. They sell the sausages everywhere in the world — except Canada and the US whose hygiene regulations exclude these and a great many artisanal products. (Hey y’all: the Europeans eat this stuff every day and are still standing…!)

(Except for the one who fell ill during the tour; perhaps heat, perhaps an early symptom of the flu that would catch up with her later.)

We packed our bags and headed to our next destination in Calafell, where we checked into the weird and somewhat horrible Hotel Solimar, a massive complex where we got to witness European-style mass tourism close up. Luckily our university escorts reviewed the offerings at the hotel buffet we were supposed to eat from that evening and realised it was in fact an inedible wasteland of fried and processed foods, prefixed by stacks of badly washed plates, and so we got to choose our meal in the somewhat better offerings along the seafront.