Flour Power: The Practice and Pursuit of Baking Sourdough Bread

by Tara Jensen, Claire Saffitz (Foreword by)

Overview

“Tara’s a natural teacher, and this book reads as if she’s at the bench next to you, patiently articulating the core concepts and techniques of bread-making, as well as the joys and rhythms of the craft.”—Claire Saffitz, bestselling author of Dessert Person, from the foreword
 
80 easy-to-follow recipes and loads of know-how, troubleshooting guidance, and bread science intel for baking your best naturally leavened loaves—from sourdough whisperer Tara Jensen

IACP AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR

Yes, you can make crusty, tender, bakery-quality sourdough bread—even if you’ve never baked before! Especially when you have a teacher like Tara Jensen (who taught both dessert guru Claire Saffitz and Southern-cooking evangelist Sean Brock) by your side. Tara’s friendly approach to technique and inspired flavors in more than eighty recipes for sourdough, rye, and whole grain bread will enrich both beginners and advanced bakers as they learn about the craft.

With Tara’s guidance and supportive voice, she shares important lessons that cover all the technical bases—from learning about flour to exploring wild yeast fermentation and developing your (doughy) intuition. From there, Tara dives deep into the worlds of sourdough, rye, and desem, showing the true diversity of bread through recipes like Miche, Chocolate Beer Bread, and Mountain Rye. There’s even an extra credit chapter on making extra-flavorful Overnight Waffles, Cheesy Cheddar Crackers, and Sourdough Chocolate-Chip Cookies. With Tara by your side, artisanal bread at home is totally achievable . . . and fun!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593232460
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	08/30/2022
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	235,454
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Tara Jensen is the author of A Baker's Year and has been baking professionally for over twenty years. She worked at Red Hen Baking in Middlesex, Vermont; Farm & Sparrow in Asheville, North Carolina; with Jennifer Lapidus at Carolina Ground, also in Asheville and ran her own bakery, Smoke Signals. Her bread and pies have been featured in publications such as Food & Wine and Bon Appétit and she teaches bread baking workshops in Virginia, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

If I had to pick a starting point for where I am now, sitting at my kitchen table in Virginia, I’d lead you back in time to a moment in 2001 when I walked into the Morning Glory Bakery, a tiny bakery in coastal Maine. There I found a woman wearing all black, with long dark hair, arms covered in tattoos, listening to Patti Smith. I asked for a job and she looked over my shoulder to see my girlfriend waiting in our Subaru out front. She glanced back at me and told me to come in the next day at 6:00 a.m.

The closest I got to touching bread was toasting bagels, but the place was packed with people who danced to the beat of a different drum. There were midwives, punk rockers, musicians, and artists scattered about, cramming jelly biscuits, hummus sandwiches, and buttered baguettes into their mouths. Growing up the oddball in a small, rural town in Maine, I found the cast of characters that paraded through the door soothing.

At the counter, stacked high with hot loaves, we’d talk about babies, women’s rights, the government, the environment, the latest music, astrological signs, and who was dating whom. We’d plan protests, birthday parties, and bike rides and end the day mopping to incredibly loud Morrissey. Impeccable attention to ingredients, ovens, and agriculture would all come later, stemming from this root of safety and comfort in a chosen family.

In 2004 I graduated college and found myself filling out an application on a snowy winter’s day at Red Hen Baking Company, a sizable bakery in central Vermont. I exaggerated my previous experience to get in the door, and it was there I was introduced to my new best friends: a wooden peel, a deck oven, a loader, a dough divider, a mixer, a water meter, and tubs upon tubs of delicious, supple artisan bread dough.

The mechanics of producing up to two thousand loaves a day were fascinating. I moved through the stations of shaping, mixing, and baking like a journeyman earning badges. My confidence grew alongside my skill (and biceps, too). There are few other times in my life that I’ve felt as powerful as those moments when I would pull back the canvas belt, watch twenty loaves slip onto a hot deck, and rush to hit the steam button, only to swirl behind me and grab another twenty loaves to slash and load. And yet, when everything was shut off and only the hum of the walk-in could be heard, I felt a whisper. This wasn’t the only way to make bread.

Two years later I loaded up my 1982 Volvo and went to work at Farm and Sparrow, a bakery tucked away in the mountains of western North Carolina. Yet again I found myself in a fake-it-till-you-bake-it scenario. Forget deck ovens and dough dividers. Here, I chopped wood, started fires, and made bread with my blood, sweat, and tears. Catapulted into the world of small-scale grain growing, fresh flour, wood-fired ovens, and wet doughs, I barely kept my chin above water.

There, low to the ground, head spinning, I found what I was looking for: bread made like a good wine, appreciated without any bells or whistles and discussed in terms of vintages and microbial profiles. I began working with freshly milled flour (no big fifty-pound bags of white stuff) and a gentle, diving arm mixer that replicated human kneading. The idea of turning on a machine and whipping bread into shape was horrifying in my new paradigm.

Those special years working with a small group of talented people making extremely good bread were wonderful, but they were also painful. I grew a small plot of wheat for the first time. I learned how to source wood and chop it to the right sizes and amounts to sustain a bread oven. I made friends with fire. I learned about prestige and the James Beard Foundation Awards and what it was like to have to block off fanatical customers at the farmers’ market. I was introduced to chefs and the back door of restaurants and late nights filled with drinking that would predictably end at the Waffle House. I learned what it was like to be called “the best.”

I also learned there is a real danger to tying your worth to how the bread comes out any given day and that it’s harsh to make fun of people who like sandwich bread. I learned that having extreme values can be lonely. I grew tired and isolated.

After watching my mentors burn bright and then burn out, I realized I didn’t want to own a large-scale bakery. I didn’t have any interest in a storefront or retail location, didn’t have any excitement about hiring staff, and didn’t want to spend my time on the computer with spreadsheets, so in 2012, when I began my own bakery—Smoke Signals (named after the smoke from the chimney of a twenty-year-old Alan Scott oven)—I sold only at farmers’ markets and made only as much as I could with my own two hands. While the solitary life of wood-fire baking suited me, it didn’t represent all of me. Knowing that I didn’t want to expand production, I turned to the original source of joy I found in bakeries: other people. I began leading classes from the bakery, taking what I learned in the professional world and sharing it with home bakers.

In 2015, I led a small group of local women through the ins and outs of making an apple pie from scratch, and eventually I expanded to classes on sourdough bread and other baked goods, such as croissants and rye bread. I liked preparing and writing the materials. I liked setting up baking stations with all the fun tools, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sparkle of fulfillment in someone’s eyes as their creations emerged from the oven. Watching new and curious bakers gain confidence and skill completely hooked me into teaching. I’ve been teaching folks how to bake ever since, and it has never ceased to be rewarding.

Most of my bread baking, for now, takes place at home with a toddler underfoot. Home is an incredibly important and often underrated place of work and life. Home is where most of us live, love, cook, make families, cry, listen to music, and play with our dogs. Home is a place of experimentation, discovery, science, and craft. I bake from home now, using either my mobile wood-fired oven or the beastly electric oven in our kitchen. I bake for myself as a form of therapy, I bake to participate in a larger cultural movement, and I bake to remember it in my bones.

The recipes (or formulas, if that’s how you like to talk) in this book are a blend of my deepest love for my different “baking parents” and styles that raised me. They incorporate my respect for the technical and professional along with my need to continually find a spiritually fulfilling existence. They honor the comfort of a busy, warm bakery and carry a torch for the kinds of innovation that come from going rogue. Think of each loaf as someone I’ve shaped a baguette next to, panned up some rye bread alongside, or chopped kindling with. Get to know them. They make good company.

Table of Contents

Foreword 10

Introduction 12

Learning About Flour 17

The Wheat Berry-Anatomy Lesson 19

The Six Basic Wheat Classifications 20

Other Key Classifications 21

Taste the Grain bow 22

How Flour Is Made 24

Making Flour at Home 27

Common Types of Flour 28

Storing Grains, Flours, and Dry Goods 29

Fermenting Flour 31

Wild Yeast and Lactobacilli 33

Lactic and Acetic Acids 34

Water 35

Developing Your (Doughy) Intuition 36

Picking a Recipe 37

Setting Up Your Work Space 38

Essential Tools 39

Methods for Bread Making 43

Reading a Recipe: Baker's Math and Percentages 44

The Overall Process of Making Bread 46

Seasonal and Environmental Considerations 62

Crust and Crumb Flavors 63

Sourdough 65

Making a Sourdough Starter 67

Patience as an Ingredient 69

Taking Care of Your Sourdough Starter 70

Before You Bake: Using Your Sourdough Starter 72

Workweek Bread 74

Lunch Box Loaf 77

Chocolate Beer Bread 81

Miche 84

Everything Bagel Fougasse 89

Milk Bread 93

Trail Mix Bread 97

Ploughman 2.0 100

City Queen Loaf 105

Marbled Deli Rye 108

Grits Bread 113

Potato Bread 116

Olive Bread 121

Yard Bread 124

Cardamom Bun Bread 129

Desem 133

My Desem Story 135

Making a Desem Starter 136

Taking Care of Your Desem Starter 138

Before You Bake: Using Your Desem Starter 139

Daily Desem 141

Cinnamon-Raisin Desem 145

Desem Pitas 148

Laurel's Loaf 153

Alan's Bread 157

Stuffed Aloo Paratha 161

Whole White Wheat Desem 165

Sweet Potato and Buckwheat Desem 169

Spelt Loaf 172

100% Einkorn Desem 177

Anadama Desem 180

Fennel, Poppy, and Yogurt Bread 185

Hazelnut and Honey Desem 188

Rye 193

What Is Rye? 194

The Rye Berry-Anatomy Lesson 195

Rye Flour Varieties 196

The Uniqueness of Rye Dough 197

The Overall Process of Making Rye Bread 198

Leavens, Sponges, and Mixing for Rye Breads 199

How to Start a 100% Rye Starter 203

Taking Care of Your Rye Starter 204

Before You Bake: Using Your Rye Starter 206

Everyday Rye 208

Milk Carton Rye 210

Knackebrod 212

Mountain Rye 214

Rye, Spelt, and Anise Loaf 218

Finnish Rye Ring 220

Apple-Oat Rye 225

Buttermilk Orange Bread 228

Candied Ginger Rye 233

Chocolate-Cherry Rye 237

Vollkornbrot 241

Rugbrod 243

Pumpernickel 247

Extra Credit 251

What Is Discard? 252

Rules for Using Discard 253

Mix and Match Discard-Sort Of 254

Monica's Banana Bread 256

Cheddar and Black Pepper Biscuits 258

Rise and Shine Bread 261

Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies 262

Coffee Cake 265

Overnight Waffles 268

Sourdough Piecrust 270

Three Seasons Pie with Crumble Topping 272

Roasted Veggie Galette 275

Rye and Buckwheat Pancakes 276

Tahini Buttercream 279

Rye Brownies 280

Meyer Lemon Tart 284

Double-Rye Tart Dough 285

Cheesy Cheddar Crackers 289

Sorghum Graham Crackers 290

Resources 294

Acknowledgments 296

Index 298

Editorial Reviews

06/06/2022

“Think of grain as fresh produce,”urges baker Jensen in this thorough and thoroughly delightful guide to baking sourdough, rye, and whole grain loaves. Developing and maintaining a worthy sourdough starter can be a chore, but Jensen (A Baker’s Year) guides readers through percentages and seasonal conditions with patience and good cheer. The novel way each recipe is introduced—method for refreshing the starter, yield and pan size, dough temperature, and skill level—is a small revelation in itself, beginning with the half whole wheat, half white flour loaf she dubs workweek bread and working up to a stunning cardamom bun bread. Even seasoned home bread makers will be surprised by a Flemish-style starter called desem (pronounced “DAY-zum”), which starts with a ball of moistened whole wheat flour buried in a container of dry flour and results in intensely “wheaty-tasting” pitas, stuffed parathas, and cinnamon-raisin loaves. Perhaps the most enriching information she imparts is the breadth of options for using those inevitable amounts of sourdough discard left over from refreshing a sourdough starter, among them coffee cake, pie and tart doughs, and sorghum graham crackers. With a fresh perspective and assured hand, Jensen offers no shortage of excellent ways to tackle the art of good bread making at home. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

I was lucky enough to attend a bread making workshop with Tara where we made the most beautiful and delicious sourdough loaves. Tara taught us about flour (we even milled our own), sourdough starter, and, of course, bread making. Reading Flour Power is like being back in that workshop. You’ll learn so much about making magnificent bread—it’s like Tara is holding your hands throughout.”—Klancy Miller, founder of For the Culture and author of Cooking Solo: The Joy of Cooking for Yourself

“Tara Jensen is an effortless and inspiring teacher. In Flour Power, she not only expertly guides readers through baking science and techniques but also passes along the everyday wisdom of how to incorporate baking bread into your life. Tara’s undeniable expertise, signature creativity, and floury fingerprints are all over these beautiful pages.”—Erin Jeanne McDowell, author of The Book on Pie

“Tara inspires me to bake. She brings together simple ingredients with integrity to bake our way through life’s hardest moments. Flour Power has all the tools to conquer our sourdough fears in the comfort of our home kitchens. I am lucky she is one of my closest friends and writing confidante—my baked goods and life are better for it.”—Melissa M. Martin, author of Mosquito Supper Club

“[A] thoroughly delightful guide to baking sourdough, rye, and whole grain loaves.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher