Our Daily Bread

Not keen on strolling around town spreading our cooties on the pretext of buying a baguette, I decided to bake some bread.  I highly recommend Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's book called How to Make Bread.  He also does killer bread baking workshops.  I left his books in the mountains where I usually spend my quiet hours there with the wood stove, but I had not forgotten much of what I learned from him 8 years ago while visiting Kate Hill.

I got my sourdough starter going, which always takes a few days to develop.  Since they strengthened the lockdown and we needed bread on the table pronto, I first baked up two small loaves of straight bread, meaning, I used baker's yeast I had in the kitchen. This is nice bread in a pinch. It was good the next morning with butter and fleur de sel.

The next day, I decided to do a loaf with a poolish, which is where you put flour and water in equal parts by weight together with just a tiny bit of yeast and let that develop and ferment just enough to add complexity to the flavor, overnight.  Incorporate it into your bread the next day, and the difference in flavor is remarkable.

The levain is coming along nicely and I will be baking with that soon, but tomorrow I will be baking with la pâte fermentée, which is where you take some bread dough you've got going, let it develop flavors overnight, and incorporate it into the next day's dough.  So today's bread with poolish will be tomorrow's bread with pâte fermentée.