desem

No Knead Desem Bread

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:08:52 +0100

I’ve adapted the No Knead Bread method for making this bread as described here, for a bread that originally requires at least 20 minutes of kneading. It turns out a quite light, crispy-crust, delicious loaf.

1 3/4 cups of fully mature desem, containing 2 cups (120g) of flour
2 1/4 cups of unchlorinated (bottled or filtered) cold water
2 to 2 1/2 tsp. salt
4 cups (480g) fresh, organic whole wheat flour (the same flour with which you made the desem starter)

In a large bowl, preferably glass or ceramic, cut the desem into little pieces, and mix in with the water and salt. Stir around, squishing the little bits of dough, until the desem completely melts into the water, making a uniform liquid. Since you won’t be kneading the bread for a long time as with the original recipe, this step is critical to ensure the desem is distributed throughout the liquid.

Add the flour, 1 cup at a time, stirring after each addition. At the end you should end up with a soggy, saggy, but not totally liquid mass. It should form a rather wet and soggy ball in the bowl.

Cover the bowl with plastic film, leaving a small gap so that air can get in. Leave the bowl at room temperature for about 8 hours (a shorter time than is required for the original recipe), or until the dough has nearly tripled in size. If you have a good mature desem to start with, this will happen reliably. Punch the dough down and leave it to re-rise for another 1-2 hours.

Make ready a clean, non-terry kitchen towel by sprinkling it rather thickly with whole wheat flour.

Take the dough out and sort of knead/round it out - it will be very sticky, but you want a sort of cohesive ball, as detailed in the original No Knead Bread recipe. Put the ball on the floured towel and cover. Let it rise for about 90 minutes.

In the meantime, heat up the oven and your heavy enamelled cast iron pot with the plastic knob removed (lest you melt it off) in a 450°F / 225°C oven for at least 30 minutes before the baking time. (I use a Le Creuset Doufeu, whose lid had no knob to start with.)

Take the heated pot carefully out of the oven, remove the lid and place on a secure heat-proof surface. Take the towel containing the dough by both ends and carefully flop the dough into the pan. Immediately put the lid back on and the pot into the oven.

Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid, lower the heat to 350°F / 175°C (this differs from the original recipe) and bake for an additional 30 minutes.

Take the loaf out of the pan and let cool before cutting, if you can resist.

Note: the crust turns out a bit thicker than the white flour No Knead, but is still thin and crisp enough. The lowering the heat and baking for a longer time is necessary to bake this heavier whole grain bread all the way through.

I still haven’t figure out how to prevent a large rip from appearing on the upper crust. Though I must say that the ripped part has a really nice, crispy/chewy texture.

Adapting the No Knead method for desem bread

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:01:15 +0100

Like probably everyone, or at least every food blogger, in the world with an oven and a fondness for baking bread, I tried the No Knead Bread as written up in the New York Times in November. Authored by Mark Bittman via Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, this almost perplexingly easy method of mixing up a bread dough that has that distinctive 'artisanal bread' crumb and thin, crackly crust caused a sensation in the teapot that is the world of food blogging.

As just about everyone says, it does produce a very good bread. And yet...for me it lacked that something extra special. This has a lot to do with the fact that in this country good bread is quite easy to get. Even the bread sold at the major supermarkets is not bad at all. The rather shiny, slightly gummy, open-grained texture of the No Knead Bread reminded me of pain paillase, a very popular twisted loaf bread that's widely sold in Swiss bakeries. The thing is though, pain paillase, being a pain au levain (a sort of sourdough) and baked into a fat baguette shape, is tastier than the all-white flour No Knead Bread. So, I haven't baked any basic No Knead since the first couple of loaves. Besides. I'm trying to cut out white flour at the moment.

The technique itself is so easy that my thoughts turned to adapting it to my favorite homebaked bread, desem. Desem bread is the first long-term project that I wrote up in a series of articles on this site 3 years ago. It's still the most interesting all-whole wheat bread that I've eaten, being so much lighter than most all-whole wheat breads, yet chewy, complex and substantial. The one drawback to desem bread is that the original recipe as calls for it to be kneaded for a very, very long time, with lots of muscle. In The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book where the recipe with long, extremely detailed instructions appeared, they call for kneading it for 20 minutes. I don't now about you, but I don't really have the time or patience to be kneading bread for 20 minutes once or more a week, even if desem bread is so good that I crave it when I don't have a loaf around.

So, since December when I stopped making white-flour No Knead, I've been experimenting with no-knead desem. It wasn't as easy as I thought: the first time the bread flopped miserably in the ultra-heated Le Creuset pan and never recovered; the second time the bread was so wet that half of it remained stuck in gooey mess on the towel; and so on. But the last few times it's worked quite well. The bread rises very nicely, the crumb is light and open yet has that 'artisanal kneaded for hours' texture, and the crust is crisp and crackly. And, that slightly sour, distinctive desem flavor is still there.

You do need to start out with a fully mature desem - an immature desem won't have the leavening power. Please follow the desem steps from day 0 if you've never given this a try. It will be worth it provided you can give it all of the right conditions.

» No Knead Bread Recipe

Sliced desem bread, showing the crumb

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:15:33 +0100

A loaf of desem bread

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:14:18 +0100

Desem, the final chapter

maki — Mon, 29 Dec 2003 07:15:36 +0100

This is the final chapter of my accounts of making desem bread, which is made with just flour, water, salt and nothing else. It's somewhere between regular baking and a science project.

My desem is now about three weeks old, and is quite mature. How do I know it's mature? Because, after it's been fed some fresh flour and water, it turns quite spongy within a few hours. It also dissolves completely in water, leaving no strings of gluten in my hand.

I've moved the desem from the cool but still warmish room where it was growing during its infancy and adolescence, to the colder (about 15°C or 60°F) unheated coom. When it's kept cooler, it grows slower. It could be kept in the refrigerator too. It take a bit of time for the desem to adjust to the cooler temperature, but it does, and it's just more convenient to slow down its growth rate unless you plan to bake with it very frequently.

To keep the desem going, just feed it ever other day or so. Whenever you feed it, give it 1 part unchlorinated water to two 2 parts whole wheat flour - e.g. 1/2 cup water, 1 cup flour. Knead well, wrap in a clean unbleached cloth or a few layers of undyed paper towels, and store in a non-metallic container.

To bake with the desem, just feed it the day before you plan to bake, take 1 1/2 cup of the desem for your baking, and let it ripen at room temperature in a covered bowl. Return the rest to the desem container to continue as the "mother", in the cool storage place.

You can try using the desem as part of a regular yeast-raised bread. It adds a pleasant sour-doughyness to yeasted bread. It can also be mixed up with flour and water to make a stiff dough, rolled out thin, brushed with a bit of water or milk, sprinkled with sesame seeds, and baked to make tasty crackers. And of course it can be used to make desem dosas.

So, here's the recipe for making desem bread with mature desem. This makes two round loaves about 25cm in diameter. It will grow bigger and lighter each time you bake, so don't worry if the first couple of bakings produce smallish loaves. I've repeated some of the instructions from the baking the first loaf entry. Note though that the amount of desem in the dough is much less (about 1/3rd) and that the times are shorter too - only 4 hours, not 10-12 hours, for the rising period.

Desem Bread

1 1/2 cups of ripened desem
1 1/3 - 2 cups of cool unchlorinated (use bottled or filtered) water
1 1/2 - 2 tsp. salt
4 cups of organic whole wheat flour

Dissolve the desem in the water. Add salt. Mix in the flour to form a slightly stiff dough.

Knead well, for about 20 minutes by hand or 10 minutes with a KitchenAid (or similar machine that can knead, and has a strong motor - this dough is too stiff for most food processors!) until the dough is stretchy, smooth and rather sticky.

Place in a covered bowl and let rise for 4 hours, at cool room temperature (see previous temperature notes for desem). If you can give it a good punch at around 3 hours. It should rise to about 2x its original size.

Take the dough out of the bowl, taking care not to break the outer smooth surface. Punch it down, cut in half, and round off each half to form two smooth balls.

Place on a baking sheet that's been greased then sprinkled with cornmeal, a bit apart to allow for expansion. Put the whole sheet in a plastic bag that's been moistened with water on the inside, and seal up the bag. Place this whole thing in a warm location - such as inside an oven, at the lowest possible temperature setting if you have an electic oven (around 40°C) or just with the pilot light on if you're using a gas oven. (I've also tried putting it on top of the VCR...just be careful not to drip any water.) Leave it at this warm rising location for 1 1/2 hours, until it's all puffy spongy looking.

Heat up the oven to 230°C (around 450° F). Put the baking sheet (without the plastic bag...) and either cover the whole thing with a large pot or heatproof bowl, or earthenware baking cover that you've soaked in water, or just spray the loaves with water, and spray more into the oven before closing. Bake for about 10 minutes at the high temperature, then lower the heat to around 180° C / 350° F and bake until done, about 50 minutes.

Enjoy!

Desem, Second Baking

maki — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 22:27:14 +0100

This is the continuation of my accounts of making desem bread, which is made with just flour, water, salt and nothing else. It's somewhere between regular baking and a science project.

It's been a week since I baked the first loaf of desem bread. Since then I've been feeding it almost every day (I skipped a feeding when we went to the LOTR trilogy marathon and Return of the King premiere, but I did feed it extra the next day.) I started with 1 cup of flour's worth of desem. During the week the desem was fed 3 cups of flour. I used 1 cup of flour worth of desem, or about 2/3rds cup of the dough, on Thursday to make some desem dosas (or dosai...) and so, I ended up with 3 cups of flour worth of desem. Confusing? Yes it can be. Well, if you lose track of how much flour you've fed the desem, you can simply measure it by packing it tight into standard measuring cups.

The second baking should follow the instructions for the first baking: that is, the proportion of ripened desem "mother" in the bread dough is 50%. This means I need about 3 cups of flour worth of desem, or a bit more than 2 cups of actual desem. Therefore, last night I fed the desem a cup of flour with 1/2 cup of water, to end up with 4 cups of flour worth of desem. 1/4 of this was cut off and kept as the ongoing "mother. The rest, I left to ripen overnight at cool room temperature (see my previous notes about temperature) in a large bowl covered with a plate.

8 AM: Time to make the bread dough. I take out the desem, which seems to be a bit spongy (a good sign), add 1 1/3rd cup of cool bottled water, 2 1/2 tsp. of salt, and then 3 cups of whole wheat flour. When I dissolve the desem in the water, it almost disintegrates completely, with just a few gluten threads left. That's a good sign - it means the desem is maturing nicely already.

After adding the flour, I knead it well for about 15-20 minutes until it feels nice and stretchy, then back it goes into the covered bowl to rise.

16:00, 4 PM: Eight hours later and the bread has risen quite a bit! I take it out, divide it into two pieces, and round off each. (see last week's entry). Last week, the dough only rose enough to form one loaf, but this time it's already rising enough for two loaves.

I place both loaves on a greased and cornmeal-dusted baking sheet, wet a large plastic bag on the inside, put the whole sheet inside the bag, seal it up, and put it in the oven set at the lowest setting, as per last week for the final "warm", humid rising.

17:30, 5:30 PM: I take the sheet out of the oven so I can heat the oven up. The dough is rising nicely indeed.

18:00, 6:00 PM: Time to bake. I need to provice extra humidity to the loaves. Now...last week I covered the loaf with a glass casserole to achieve this. I would have done this again, plus another bowl to cover the 2nd loaf, but I broke the casserole during the week (don't you hate it when you break a favorite dish or something?). So, I provide humidity in another way: I place a pan of boiling water on the bottom rack, and I also spray the loaves thoroughly before they go in.

The loaves bake initially at 230° C / 45° F for about 20 minutes, then 180° C / 250° F for 50 minutes, as per last week.

19:30, 7:30 PM: And here's the result:

Each loaf is about 25 cm / 10 inches or so in diameter

The leavening power for the second week is quite impressive. Last week, the same amount of dough only produced one loaf that was about the same size as these! The crust didn't split off this time. I did let it brown a bit too long - I think I will try 15 minutes at the high temperature next time.

Desem bread really tastes the best after it's cooled, and we let it cool for a while before eating. We had it for dinner actually, with some soup. It tasted wonderful. The crumb was much lighter, and the crust was nice and crispy.

The next time I'll post the recipe for baking desem bread when the desem is mature - which mine already is, after 2 weeks. From here on, all I have to do is to feed the "mother" desem at least every other day or so, always using unchlorinated water and organic whole wheat flour, and it will give me many many great loaves, not to mention other desem-based goodies.

It's really a fascinating thing to try if you are interested in natural yeast breads. It does require some patience, but if all the conditions are right it's certainly worth the effort. I hope my accounts here will inspire some other people to try it too.

The Care and Feeding of Desem, Week 2

maki — Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:22:21 +0100

So, once you have a desem, how do you take care of it?

For the second week (that is the week after it's been born, then grown in the in the incubator flour bed), it has to be fed every day. The thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn't feed it more flour than is already in it.

You start out with about 2/3rds cup of desem, which has 1 cup of flour in it. If you intend to bake at the end of the week, you will need to end up with 3 cups of flour worth of desem plus 1 cup to carry on as the "mother". So, you will need to feed 3 cups of flour to the desem during the week. That means 1/3 cup per day, plus 1 cup on the last day, or however you would like to divide it up.

The procedure for feeding the desem is: add half the amount of water of the flour you're adding (e.g. if you're adding 1/3rd cup of flour, add 1/6th cup of water) to the desem, soften it up, then add the flour, knead well, and return to the storage container in the cool location. Be careful not to get any salt into the mother desem.

You can always add more, as long as it's less than the amount of flour in the existing desem. Let's say you wanted to bake a small 2-cup loaf every day to see the progress. Then you'd add 1/2 cup of flour every day, divide the desem in half, and use that half + 1/2 cup of water + a teaspoon of salt + 1 cup of flour for the loaf. You can also create more desem than you'll need for the next baking, to create desem dosas for example.

I'll be feeding the desem 1/2 cup of flour per day, but most likely I'll be waiting to bake the next loaf until next Saturday (especially since this week is going to be pretty busy.)

Desem, Day 8-9: The First Loaf

maki — Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:04:13 +0100

This is the continuation of my accounts of making desem bread, which is made with just flour, water, salt and nothing else. It's somewhere between regular baking and a science project.

I am writing this somewhat bleary-eyed after a late night...

The process of making the first loaf of desem bread is very long, and it's easy to miscalculate the time needed. That's what I did. Here's how it went...

Saturday, 12 noon: I take out the desem which has been ripened at room temperature (around 21° C or 70° F) overnight. (This is where I went wrong..I should have started earlier.) I add 1 1/2 cups of bottled water, soften the desem (this seems to be getting easier - the desem already is losing that gluten-rubbery feeling. The micro-organisms seem to prefer eating the gluten, so a mature ripened desem has almost no gluten left.), mix in 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt and add 3 cups of whole wheat flour. Then comes the hard part. The dough needs kneeding (no pun intended) for 600 strokes or 20 minutes by hand.

There are two ways of dealing with the kneading problem. One is to cave in and buy a KitchenAid. The other is to consider it as a kind of therapeutic exercise. That's the approach I have taken so far (I do some white bread doughs and pizza dough in the food processor). The kneading time for desem is indeed very long, but it's sort of like taking a bath or being stuck on the train with no reading material - your mind is free to wander.

After 10 minutes of contemplative kneading, I go and get my iPod.

Finally kneaded well and feeling quite stretchy, I round it off into a bowl, then put it in a covered bowl for the first rising. The first rising for the first loaf takes eight to ten hours. Yes, that is a long time. The temperature for this stage is again cool room temperature.

Saturday, 21:30/9:30PM: The dough has risen a bit, maybe to about 1 1/2 times its original volume. That's to be expected for the first loaf. The desem hasn't developed its full leavening powers yet. I give the dough a good punch.

Saturday, 22:30/10:30PM: It's now time for it's final warm rising. I take out the dough, punch it down, and round it off once, then twice, forming a tight gluten coat on the outside. This is supposed to help it rise nice and high. I butter the lid of a glass casserole dish, sprinkle with corn meal, and place the rounded dough on it. I then put the bowl of the casserole on top like a dome, put the whole thing in a plastic bag I've wetted on the inside, close up the plastic bag and put it in the oven that's just turned on to the lowest possible setting.

Let me explain. For the final rising, the dough has to be in a high humidity, warm location. For me that means the electric oven turned on to below the "keep warm" stage, and the plastic bag. I've been thinking for a while of building a kind of dough incubator - have a heating pad or electric blanket in a styrofoam box, with some source of humidity (the plastic bag would still work in this)...but I haven't gotten around to building it yet. Anyway, the oven does get a tad too warm (around 50°C) but I try to compensate by turning it off, then on, a couple of times throughout the rising period. The rising period is 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Yes, I had to wait for the dough to finish rising at around 1:30 AM. Miscalculation indeed. It wasn't so bad though since it's the weekend and I'm a night owl anyway. For the last 30 minutes I take the dough out of the oven to heat it up to 230°C (around 450° F), and keep the covered bowl on a pullout shelf in front of the oven where it's plenty warm.

Sunday, 1:30 AM: Time to bake finally! For some added humidity I spray the inside of the bowl with water, and put the whole thing in the oven. It bakes for about 20 minutes at the high temperature, and then about 50 minutes at 180° C/350° F, until the loaf is done. When is it done? When if you rap on the bottom, there's a hollow sound.

Sunday, 3:00 AM - ish: I'm very sleepy now, but the house is smelling pretty good. I take the loaf out of the oven. Oops, the top has split:

I realize I forgot to do one thing, which was to poke some holes in the top of the dough before baking. Well it's not too bad. I can't resist taking a slice to take a look at the inside:

It's a pretty dense crumb, but it has definitely risen. The crust is marvelously crispy if a bit thick, and the flavor is good. I leave it to cool on a rack and go to sleep finally.

Sunday, noon Someone's been nibbling on the bread already. I take another thin slice, it's definitely good. Next week I'll bake the second loaf, and compare it to this first one. It should be lighter for sure.

Which brings us to the Care and Feeding of Desem, which is in the next post.

How to eat the first loaf: This first loaf is pretty dense, like a German pumpernickel, so it's best eaten like that kind of bread is, thinly sliced. We had some for lunch with a bit of butter and ham, cheese (a walnut cheese and some cream cheese), and smoked mackerel, and it was really good.

And, in case you're wondering if every loaf is going to take 14-15 hours to complete, don't worry. It's only for the first "immature" loaves. The loaf next week may take just as long to rise. If it has already achieved maturity it will only take 4 hours. I'll wait and see.

Desem, Day 7

maki — Sat, 13 Dec 2003 11:20:40 +0100

This is the continuation of my accounts of making desem bread, which is made with just flour, water, salt and nothing else. It's somewhere between regular baking and a science project.

On Day 7 (which was yesterday actually...I fell asleep before I could blog it), the desem, now sitting all alone without its flour bed, is taken out of the container, softened with 1/3 cup of pure water, and then fed 1 cup of flour. The whole thing is then kneaded quite well, about 10 minutes, until it gets rather sticky. It even sticks to the surface of whatever you are kneading it on. (I knead it on my kitchen table, well cleaned beforehand of course. The table is just the perfect height for me to put full pressure on the dough.)

It's then divided up into 4 quarters. One quarter, which measures about 2/3 cup and contains 1 cup of flour, is returned to the container. This is the desem "mother", which will be kept over for future bakings. The container goes back to the cool place where the incubator-pot used to reside. The rest of the dough is kneaded back to gether into a smooth ball, placed in a bowl with a lid (I use a glass casserole dish with a lid), and let to rest overnight at room temperature.

Room temperature: that's the tricky part. If the temperature is too high, the dough turns sour in a bad way and won't develop its rising powers very much. Our house has floor heating (the heat source is geothermal), and the temperature is at a constant 21° C, or about 70° F. This is at the upper range of the recommended temperature range of between 65° F and 70° F, or 18.3° C and 21.11° C. So the desem does pretty nicely placed inside the kitchen cabinet.

Now...those of you living in the U.S. might be thinking "65° F and 70° F? That's room temperature?" Especially if you live in a typically overheated apartment. That's what I thought too actually. 65°F or 18°C is pretty cold. The ladies who wrote the book live in a farmhouse, apparently, which must be pretty drafty or something. This is one of the points that annoys at least one person that's read the book...the authors keep a cow for fresh milk, and other things, and my friend the confirmed urbanite finds this totally unrealistic. I think it's safe to say that 99% of us do not have the means for keeping cows. But I digress.

My apartment in NYC was heated to about 78°F, if not more, and even at my mother's house out in the suburbs of Long Island, the thermostat was usually set to around 72° F. I think that's pretty standard for American houses. So, you will have to find a relatively cool but not too cold spot for the desem dough to rise. Again, the only way to find a cool enough spot is to go around with a thermometer and measure the temperature. In an apartment building I may even try out the basement or laundry room, perhaps with a note on your bowl saying "please do not disturb, science experiment in progress."

Desem dosas

maki — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 22:28:38 +0100

Yesterday, I took the cut away desem and made desem dosas. I had never made dosas with desem that was so young before, it but it still came out great.

Dosas are thin unleavened South Indian bread made traditionally from fermented rice and something called "black gram". Epicurious.com says that gram flour, or besem is chickpea flour...but no chickpea I know of is black...so I'm not quite sure what "black gram" is. [Edit: I stand corrected. Apparently beige is not the only color of chickpeas! See comments from Alberto.] Here is a recipe for real dosas. I haven't found black gram anywhere here in Zürich, but in the meantime the dosas made from excess desem is mighty tasty. The added benefit of desem dosas is that you're using something that you might have to throw away anyway (extra desem), so you get to feel smugly frugal too. I almost make desem just for the sake of being able to make these dosas. They are that good. And, they are so easy to make.

Desem dosas are more sour than desem breads because you let it ferment at room temperature for 3 hours or more. Actually, it tastes better when it's pretty sour. It makes a great accompaniment for curry and other spicy dishes, or even with the Breakfast fry-up with spicy potatoes, instead of having toast. (It then becomes more of a lunch than a breakfast.) It's also great used like Norwegian lefse (flat bread made with rye flour), and eaten with smoked salmon or other smoked fish, sour cream, cream cheese etc. But my absolute favorite way of eating it is with plain cottage cheese and a drizzle of honey. It's also pretty tasty just on its own, especially if you cook it until it's crispy.

Desem dosas

Note: the book gives a recipe for desem dosas, but it's curiously incomplete - for example, it doesn't say how much desem you need. Well I have the previous edition, so maybe this has been corrected in the current edition. Anyway these are the proportions I use.

About 1 cup worth of desem. This can be a bit "off" or over-ripened desem.
About 1 1/2 cup- 2 cups of water - can be tap water, unless your water is really strongly chlorinated, in which case use filtered or bottled water.
1 cup of whole-wheat flour.
Oil for cooking - peanut oil or, to add a bit more taste olive oil.

Dissolve the desem in the water. Younger desem will have stringy gluten in it, but mature desem will disintegrate completely in the water.

Add the flour and mix well. Cover the bowl and let it stand at room temperature for at least 3 hours. You can also leave it for a day or so in the refrigerator, but you should let it stand at room temperature for at least an hour before cooking.

When it comes time to cook it, it may have separated, so mix it well, and add a bit more water or flour to make it into a thickish batter, about the consistency of pancake batter. At this point you can add a bit of salt if you like, though I find that the tanginess of the desem makes this unnecessary.

Heat up a non-stick frying pan. (You can make it in a regular frying pan but it will probably stick unless you add copious amounts of oil.) Heat until a drop of water sizzles in the pan, then add some oil. Add the batter. Spread it around with the back of a spoon or something, and cook until the bottom is cooked and a bit crispy. Turn over and cook briefly on the other side. It's best if the dough is firm enough to turn over comfortably. Like crepes, for some reason the first dosa comes out rather badly, but subsequent ones come out fine.

Eat while warm. If you need to reheat them you can do so in the microwave, or briefly in a frying pan.