As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them. Most recently: How to Predict the Future. This post was brought to you by the talented commenter laurenipsum.
Cooking is my haven from research science. It’s funny, because cooking isn’t really all that different from bench work. I mix things together with precision while following written instructions and wait given periods of times. Maybe it’s easier to obtain desired results in the kitchen (feeding myself), so I feel more confident in my abilities. I throw myself at new recipes with zeal. I fixate and obsess. Right now my obsession is bread.
I hadn’t been exposed to really great bread until Hungry Ghost Bread. Hungry Ghost Bread is a one-room bakery in Northampton, MA, though you’d probably mistake it for a small cottage. I lived immediately next door to Hungry Ghost in college, so I’m well acquainted with their bread. The deeply browned, fire-licked, hardened, and chewy crust readily tears to reveal the softest and spongiest innards. Their bread goes best with a homemade tomato soup, which softens the crust and soaks into its airy pockets. I’d most often end up buying a five-dollar loaf on the weekends (because I’d inevitably slept through brunch), pairing it with a crunchy apple and a sharp cheddar cheese from State Street Market. Hungry Ghost Bread is my bread ideal and inspiration. It’s a lot to live up to.
I’ve been curious about bread making since college but intimidated to try it. How could my attempts compare to those Hungry Ghost artisanal loaves? It doesn’t help that bread recipes are pretty opaque to a beginner. What does knead to desired consistency really mean when you’ve never made bread before? Recently The Kitchn, my go-to-website resource for recipes and cooking inspiration, posted beginner guides to make your own starter and a simple sourdough sandwich loaf. This was my chance to conquer bread.
Pursuing my graduate degree in the sciences has honed my resilience in learning new things. I am your canonical perfectionist. I like to get things right. I like to be good at things. I get embarrassed when I make mistakes. You can’t maintain perfectionism in running experiments though. Something inevitably goes wrong and then you learn from it. You try again. Actually, this is how you learn anything. You make mistakes. But it’s really important to fail and repeat with science. I’ve failed so many times at this point. Failing at making bread doesn’t seem that bad. I can try it. It will be okay if it isn’t perfect.
I love complicated processes and routines. There are a lot of steps to puzzle over. Maybe this is why I enjoy making so many things from scratch. Maintaining a starter can be involved and time intensive, akin to looking after a pet (your pet yeast.) To initiate a starter, you mix flour and water, cover and leave at room temperature. You add flour and water and stir every day for a week. After a few days of this, the mixture will bubble, grow and develop a film of moisture on top. Wild yeast break down the flour into starches and sugars, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol. My starter smells potently like beer.
I’m still figuring out the actual making bread part. The most basic steps involve mixing the dough (containing water, flour, yeast and salt), kneading, allowing the dough to rise, shaping the loaf, allowing the loaf to rise again and baking. In mixing and kneading, you want to foster the structural protein gluten so your bread can hold its shape. Rising gives the yeast time to process the flour and produce gas. I made things more difficult by using whole wheat flour. Whole wheat, being less processed, has a grainier texture and can cut the strands of gluten.
My loaves so far have been chewy, dense and lacking in flavor. I’m unfazed by these disappointments. Maybe lab work has trained me to expect that nothing will work the first time. The bread is at least edible and gives me plenty to think about.
Fixating on bread means I talk about it all of the time. I’ve found the reaction from friends surprising. I’d expect boredom and disinterest, but most often they are confused. Why am I going to all of this trouble? Why don’t I just buy bread? I’ve been most surprised by their apparent discomfort though. While I’m intrigued and looking forward to the challenge of my next attempt, they encourage me to bail. They cut me off when I start speculating on what might have gone wrong. Haven’t I heard of the no knead recipes? Why am I trying to use my own starter? Why am I doing this again? Maybe when I acknowledge I’m struggling, they want to spare me the frustration. Maybe it’s difficult to hear that something is going poorly without knowing how to fix it. They pose the immediately obvious solution, get out of this silly experiment, rather than wanting to discuss rising times or if I should let the dough rest after mixing or knead immediately.
I suppose the time and thought I’ve invested into bread making is pretty crazy. Compared to my day-to-day in lab, figuring out bread seems manageable though. After all, I’ve spent years repeating experiments that require me to come in at strange hours of the night, take hours for me to perform, or require months of waiting before I know any results. I would probably give up on bread if I didn’t have an idea of how to improve and move forward with my efforts. Luckily, I have a lot of experience with experiments not working optimally and the resolve and know-how to continue forward. Namely, I know how to troubleshoot.
Troubleshooting involves identifying what went wrong and how you can address the problem. It’s one of the most important skills you develop as a researcher. How do you think through a problem when something doesn’t work out how you expected? Do you repeat the experiment without changing anything? Do you change just one condition or many? With complicated, time intensive experiments there could be dozens of things you could try differently. Good troubleshooting requires strategizing.
My failed loaves provide insight into future bread making strategies. Having something concrete to go on, density and absence of flavor, I know what conditions to vary. I’ve been playing with how long and at what temperature I allow my dough to rise, trying to give the yeast enough time to produce gas and make the bread lighter. I’ve learned that overnight rises in the fridge don’t work very well. I’ve increased the amount of starter I use to give a more traditional sourdough flavor. I’ve added honey. Just like when I get stuck in lab, reading what other people have done and talking through some of my ideas have helped. As long as I have an idea of what I can try next, bread making doesn’t seem so frustrating or impossible.
I’m a far ways off from artisanal bread loaves I remember from Hungry Ghost Bread, but I’m enjoying the process. Amidst my brick-like loaves, I’m learning more about bread making than I ever thought I would want to know. Most surprising, I’ve come to appreciate my training as a scientist in a new context. Not only has it come in handy for tackling problems in the kitchen, but I realize I’ve developed the confidence to persist in failure, no matter what I’m working on.
WHOLE WHEAT SOURDOUGH LOAF RECIPE (IN PROGRESS, adapted from The Kitchn)
5 oz water
¾ teaspoon yeast
1 cup sourdough starter*
2-2 ¼ cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon honey
Mix warm water, yeast and starter. Let rest for 3-5 minutes to activate yeast. Add salt and honey. Add flour. Stir. Let rest for 20 minutes. Knead for 10-15 minutes and form into ball. Roll in olive oil in clean bowl and cover for 2-4 hours at room temperature. Form loaf. (Flatten dough into rectangle. Fold into thirds. Fold again in half so you have a taut, smooth top.) Cover for 2-4 hours at room temperature. Bake at 450ºC for 10 minutes, spraying oven with water when you put loaf in for a crispy crust. Reduce temperature to 400ºC and bake for another 25 to 30 minutes. Remove loaf from pan and allow to cool on a rack.
*STARTER: Add equal weight water and flour (2 oz of each, about ½ cup.) Stir, cover, and leave at room temperature. (REMEMBER: rinse utensils immediately or you will have flour glue covering your mixing spoon.) Repeat for five days. At this point you’ll have a lot of starter. Remove half before feeding again. Keep covered in refrigerator. Take out once a week, remove half, feed equal weight water and flour.
Tags: food, gal science, recipes, science
This is great, and I have never wanted so badly to be friends with someone based solely on the internet. Do you personify your starter with a name?
A name would be a great idea (which I never even thought of doing)! I name my pets after scientists so I have there to start…
“It’s funny, because cooking isn’t really all that different from bench work.” See, I have NEVER understood why so many scientists are into baking because of that exact reason, and even though your piece is lovely and the things you say about science are true I am STILL baffled!
When I’m home from lab the only things I make are cocktails, salad, soup, and cheese/charcuterie plates, all of which are pretty forgiving about what you’re chucking in.
Yep! Why would I look at a protocol when I don’t have to? A grilled cheese sandwich requires about as much knowledge and work as making 1X PBS from 10X PBS, so it’s perfect for me.
As a chemist, I sometimes feel the way you do about baking, because it’s too close to following a prep, but I find cooking to be different.
Honestly, most things I make for dinner are very forgiving, and they generally don’t turn out poorly as long as I’m paying attention, so they kind of make up for a bad day at lab. Even if all the reactions I’ve run that day have failed, I know I can make something still, and it’s relaxing for me.
That being said, most of my labmates just go out to eat, which I totally understand!
Once, just once, the sourdough rye bread came out perfectly: dense but still light, chewy, sour, delicious. Every other time the dough breaks and tears and won’t retain its smoothness and refuses to rise. Still trying to recreate that perfect loaf.
I love baking bread too (although I am not a scientist so it’s a nice change from my actual work). Figuring out the right rise times when I moved from sea level to the mountains has been my biggest challenge so far.
Now that you mention it, my work and my cooking do have a lot in common. Unfortunately, I’m a field ecologist not a lab scientist, so there’s less precise measurements and tightly controlled experimentation and more eyeballing/”ground estimates”, swapping things around because “they fill the same niche”, making equipment out of things I find lying around, and experimenting along the lines of “I dunno, what happens if you poke it?”
Oh my goodness, she is absolutely not overselling Hungry Ghost bread one bit. It is amazing. I was back for the weekend recently and was tempted to buy out their entire stock (until the logical part of my brain kicked in to remind me that I probably couldn’t eat that much bread before it went stale).
I haven’t tried to recreate it yet, but now that I’ve a recipe to start from…
Oh I’m so into this. I started making bread last winter and it just makes you feel so god damn accomplished! As a side experiment would you consider using packet yeast? It could remove the variability of the starter until you’ve figured out your kneading technique, rising times etc? I haven’t ventured into starter territory yet so if I had a hat madam I’d be tipping it to you.
I love baking bread, especially from a starter, because you can be so darned imprecise with it- and in fact, you have to be willing to improvise and vary your routine. Is the weather cool and humid? Warm and dry? Is your starter having a rambunctious week or is it lazy (I swear yeasts have weeks when they just wanna lie there and sleep- no eating, no bubbling, just sleep)? My basic recipe goes: take some starter- aim for around a cup, depending upon its energy level when fed- add the same amount of water, then add about 3-4 cups flour (whatever sort I have around that week) and 1/2 teaspoon more salt than I think it needs. It’ll be fairly stiff dough but still sticky- but it would rather stick to itself than to a bowl or spoon. Let rise as weather conditions demand, bake at 400ish until done. Also, 1/3ish cup of yogurt works wonders for a sluggish dough and does nice things to the bread’s texture.
Beginning bread bakers might like Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. My college age son turns out great loaves using this method.
This piece makes me so many different kinds of happy. I am a fellow scientist (grad student) and bread enthusiast, and in both arenas you are absolutely right: you have to be comfortable with failure and learn to embrace it. When I go home for the holidays I always pick a ridiculous recipe and make it as a grand experiment, much to my family’s dismay. But good things have come from it! I can make chewy, perfect bagels now, for instance, and my first batch looked like sad deflated tires.
When I was a kid I loved building forts for the same reason, whether of the blanket or outdoor variety. It’s about finding the right angles and pieces, and when it inevitably falls down, you learn what worked and what didn’t, and your next fort is the better for it.
I bake too! I was a commercial baker when I was at university (at one of the bakeries your Sourdough White Vienna photo is from, in fact) and only just started home baking four years after I gave up doing it professionally. Home baking has a whole different set of problems to solve compared to what I did professionally, although the “how do I get rid of these wholes in my loaves?” problem continues to dog me no matter what the scale. Most people are really impressed when I say I bake my own bread, though, and that I do it without machinery. I never know what to say to that because it’s such an easy, lazy task to me.
PS my starter is named Rocky II
I bake too! I was a commercial baker when I was at university (at one of the bakeries your Sourdough White Vienna photo is from, in fact) and only just started home baking four years after I gave up doing it professionally. Home baking has a whole different set of problems to solve compared to what I did professionally, although the "how do I get rid of these wholes in my loaves?" problem continues to dog me no matter what the scale. Most people are really impressed when I say I bake my own bread, though, and that I do it without machinery. I never know what to say to that because it's such an easy, lazy task to me.
PS my starter is named Rocky II
I really liked reading this & I thought it was very interesting how people just wanted to ‘solve’ the problem. We run into that a lot too, where we are trying to learn something (cooking/baking or gardening usually) in the real way where you experiment and try to understand what is happening underneath, and then people are like ‘Wow why are you working so hard, just do this!’
But working hard can be FUN.
Sorry, commenting before reading full article, but Hungry Ghost! Baldwinite! CAAAARBS!
yay smithies on the toast! (tylerite here)
This is so great. I love seeing different people's approaches to baking specific things, especially when people's technical experiences are really close but prepare things which are understood/consumed differently, as in science and cuisine.
I'm a writer and babysitter so it's a different type of trial, error, and repetition. For my food blog I try to really test the recipes, which does add time and cost, but I feel it's very useful to have that "OMG WHAT'S IT DOING' information first-hand. (I love Kenji Alt-Lopez's food lab. Lots of pictures. I am not a cleverbox.)
My dad cooks Thai food professionally, not a cuisine known for its bread (we teeeend to take bread as an accompaniment to satay, or a sweet dessert w/ coconut custard, I think we're more influenced by HK or Japanese-style bread baking), so he throws food together like WHOOAA but occasionally bakes in an experimental way. One of the first things I remember he baked with me were turtle-shaped rolls.
I *love* sourdough, so thank you for this. I need to try it! My dad is into his bread, too, I’ll bet he’d be over the moon if I gave him some starter as a present 🙂
As I type, I’m waiting for my home-made fruit loaves to finish baking. I’ll cool them down and then put them away for tomorrow’s breakfast. I can’t wait. I may even go to bed early just so it’s closer to waking up and eating a couple of slices, lightly toasted, with too much butter.
I *love* sourdough, so thank you for this. I need to try it! My dad is into his bread, too, I'll bet he'd be over the moon if I gave him some starter as a present 🙂
As I type, I'm waiting for my home-made fruit loaves to finish baking. I'll cool them down and then put them away for tomorrow's breakfast. I can't wait. I may even go to bed early just so it's closer to waking up and eating a couple of slices, lightly toasted, with too much butter.
yay smithies on the toast! (tylerite here)
yay for bread! your post made me want to try sourdough again. why must it be so hot?? (I do not want to turn on the oven for the next 2 months. I will, because pie, but I do not want to.)
I think you captured what I like about bread baking too. I don’t do bench work, but I can understand why it’s appealing in the same way. Lots of variables to tweak, and it’s fun to figure out how extra humidity, or higher temperature, or different flour, or whatever else changes the outcome. But, on the other hand, if you mess up a detail, or you don’t do the timing precisely, or you just feel like trying something totally different and new, no big deal. not like benchwork where you have to follow the process exactly to try to get repeatable results. it’s jut bread. 🙂
yay for bread! your post made me want to try sourdough again. why must it be so hot?? (I do not want to turn on the oven for the next 2 months. I will, because pie, but I do not want to.)
I think you captured what I like about bread baking too. I don't do bench work, but I can understand why it's appealing in the same way. Lots of variables to tweak, and it's fun to figure out how extra humidity, or higher temperature, or different flour, or whatever else changes the outcome. But, on the other hand, if you mess up a detail, or you don't do the timing precisely, or you just feel like trying something totally different and new, no big deal. not like benchwork where you have to follow the process exactly to try to get repeatable results. it's jut bread. 🙂
Look at all these people who want to talk about making bread! including me.
The flavor issue might be from your starter. Wild yeast is wild, and some starters taste better than others.
I used to work in photo labs, maintaining processing color balances. Same sort of tweaking going on.
Just ditch the commercial yeast…. Dooooo iiit!
Adds variability but I promise the taste won’t be lacking. Though sometimes I have to wait a long time for the rise. That being said after over a year of awesomeness my starter just died. If it smells of acetone, THROW IT OUT
Kind of surprised that there’s no mention of Tartine’s amazing Bread Book which is how a lot of people seem to get into wild yeast starters. Here’s a link that shows the whole process with day by day photos so you can see what it looks like, and suggests using a rye starter (having done a bunch of different ones I also recommend rye to get yourself going) — this is not from Chad but from Francis-Olive, a fantastic baker and very interesting gal:
http://tartine-bread.blogspot.com/2013/02/9-days….
I would love to know what folks think about the whole concept of starter as local-yeast capture device. I’ve read in one spot that you keep reinoculating your starter with whatever was on your flour in the first place, which makes sense.