How one baker focuses on the grains for better baking
Michael Williams is getting closer to baking his perfect loaf of bread.
Williams, co-owner and bread baker for Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton, has spent the past couple of years polishing his bread game.
“I got exposed to great bread when I went to Germany,” he said, “to flour that was local and freshly milled, and bread that was made with a natural starter. That was what was most easily available in the bakery in our tiny little 1,100-person village. I’ve been chasing that bread ever since; every refinement has been getting me closer to that experience.”
Williams and his wife, Addie Leader-Zavos, combine their passion for growing fresh, organic produce and locally made artisanal foods. While Leader-Zavos bakes virtually everything else, Williams is in charge of the bread.
The journey toward the very best bread takes the form of tiny, incremental steps, but he sees constant progress. “The best example I can give you is actually the Swedish rye. I made that for Addie on our second date. And I was using King Arthur flour, then I was using a sifted rice flour. I was using molasses instead of beet syrup, but now I’m using a Swedish baking syrup that’s beet-based. Over time, I’ve whittled it down to the essentials and getting the absolute best ingredients I can. The pursuit of that led me to constantly question, ‘Where is this coming from? How is it being processed?’ I ask that over and over and over again.”
Because his platonic ideal of a loaf of bread has very few ingredients — flour, salt, a natural sourdough starter, something to help feed that starter (that’s where the Swedish baking syrup comes in), and water — Williams has put more thought into the flour he uses than most people put into planning their retirement.
“I wanted flour that was what I refer to as ‘live flour.’ It has never been separated, and it has never been irradiated. Industrial flour is almost always separated. It is sifted hot, or it is milled hot, separated into its component parts and the germ is irradiated to denature volatile oils. When they oxidize, they become rancid. It’s a very distinct odor and it’s very unpleasant. It totally makes sense why they would not want that in their product going out into the world but unfortunately most of the nutrition is in those oils, because the best nutrition in the grain is fat-soluble. So not only that, but that’s where all the flavor is. That’s where all those aromatic esters and aldehydes are, and they get destroyed by the same process that denatures those easily oxidized oils.”
Once Williams had defined what he was looking for in a bread flour, he started using flour that was shipped from a regional mill in South Carolina. Eventually he found a mill closer to home. “We found a couple of different options, and the one that really struck us was this place in Cambridge [Massachusetts] called Elmendorf Baking Supplies. They have a mill, and they mill for themselves and for some other people. And so we started ordering from them. They source their grain regionally from small regenerative farms. They work with private grains. They work with farms in New York and Maine and Massachusetts. The step we took here, we were getting bread flour from a variety of wheat called Glenthat is 15 and a half percent protein, which is astronomically high.”
(As a point of reference, King Arthur’s bread flour, which has an excellent reputation, has a protein content of 12.7 percent. The amount of protein in a flour determines how well a baker can develop gluten, the elastic material that gives a loaf of bread a chewy texture and traps carbon dioxide to make it puff up as it bakes.)
Williams uses a mixture of the Glen flour and rye flour to make his Swedish rye bread. “One of the tricky things about baking with rye flour is that rye notoriously destroys gluten structures,” he said. “So rye has almost no protein in it. This rye bread is only like 31 percent rye. It’s not a high rye, but the blend really does a great job of holding up with that rye in it.”
But for Williams, this flour is just one more step toward a truly great bread. Eventually, he said, he and his wife would like to mill their own flour. “It’s a process of evolution,” he summed up, “First the flour, then the mill, then a wood-fired oven, because I would much rather bake bread on a wood fire.”
Bread
The farm stand at Eden’s Table Farm (240 Stark Highway North, Dunbarton, 774-1811, edenstablefarm.square.site) is closed until Feb 5. Hours when it reopens will be Wedensday-Friday 1-7pm and Saturdays from 9am-5pm.