Jim Williams of Seven Stars Bakery

What’s your favorite thing to bake?
Bread, for sure. I like bread. There’s something about bread. If I never mix another muffin again, I am very content with that. But bread is totally different. And bread is a funny thing, people that are really into bread get it, people that aren’t, don’t. It’s a great thing.

What is there to get about bread?
There’s something about it. The whole process, the fermentation process, the way you can manipulate it. There’s a ton of science behind but you don’t necessarily need to know it. If you know how to make bread you don’t really need to know the why. I don’t know a ton about the science of it. What I know is what I see and feel. The more you learn, the more there is to learn. You never stop learning how to make bread. Maybe that’s what I like about it, it’s simple yet complex at the same time.

What are some of the basics behind the baking?
We don’t use any bread flour here; we use all-purpose flour. The big difference is that bread flour is super strong. For really wet, long fermented breads, like we do, we wouldn’t get the same kind of texture, hole structure and volume that we’re looking for. Whereas bread flour would be better for bagels and really fast breads. If you are really fermenting for long periods of time you really need a low protein flour.

Why would you ferment for a long time?
That is where you get flavor. The flavor of the bread is from the fermentation. We use very little honey or sugar. We rely on the fermentation for the flavor. Most of our breads are flour, water and salt. That’s it.

Can you explain the difference between using a yeast versus having a naturally leavened (risen) bread?
Some of our breads have yeast in them. Others are naturally leavened. They kind of do the same thing, they ferment a dough. The difference though is that the sourdough is perpetuated over time. With a commercial yeast, which you buy in a block and it looks like a brick, you just weigh out what you need. The sourdough (or natural) yeast starts with flour and water; we mix them together, let it sit for awhile and it starts to naturally ferment. So, we keep building on it. So now, every day, we take a piece of it, and we add more flour and water to it, and then tomorrow we’ll make bread with that. Then the next day we’ll pull a piece off of that and we just keep going.

So, you’ve used the same sourdough strain all these years?
Yes, and it sounds crazier than what it really is. You hear about these 100-year old yeasts but it doesn’t mean anything because it really becomes your environment. Once you have it established you just want to keep it alive.

Article

Is it Lonely?

This morning I got up with Bill at 4:00 AM. I started the coffee pot and by four fifty I walked over to the community kitchen. At 5:00 AM I arrived and began shaping the refrigerated dough into braids. By six fifteen the loaves were shaped and now the oven was preheating to 450. At 6:30 I baked the 13 braided loaves. Three were smaller than the others. When they were done I put them in two big baskets, cleaned up turned off the lights and went home to Lily. I loaded the washing machine with my dirty clothes and apron, took a shower, put on nice clothes and here I am. I asked myself, is it lonely to bake during the predawn hours? Maybe, but maybe not since I had a million microorganisms keeping me company.

I Bake Therefore I Am

I am making granola and prepping the sourdough batter for LOAVES of LOVE to be served at the the Tuesday night community supper. I am loving this cold sunny Sunday where morning seems to last all day. It has been a busy time. Everyone is grouchy about the cold weather but I love it! When the weather warms up I will be in allergy agony from the mold and pollen. The Spring light is back and the sun is warm even though the air is still cold. This is perfect!

Wild and Friendly Yeast

The more you bake bread the more alive your kitchen becomes.

The amount of yeast you use in your bread dough has a significant bearing on how quickly it’ll rise, and thus on your own schedule. By reducing the yeast, you ensure a long, slow rise, one more likely to produce a strong dough able to withstand the rigors of baking.

The more yeast in a recipe initially, the quicker it produces CO2, alcohol, and organic acids. Alcohol, being acidic, weakens the gluten in the dough, and eventually the dough becomes “porous,” and won’t rise; or won’t rise very well.

By starting with a smaller amount of yeast, you slow down the amount of CO2, alcohol, and organic acids being released into the dough, thus ensuring the gluten remains strong and the bread rises well—from its initial rise in the bowl, to its final rise in the oven.

Remember that this slow rise extends to the shaped loaf, as well as dough in the bowl. Once you’ve shaped your loaf, covered it, and set it aside to rise again, it may take 2 hours or more, rather than the usual 1 to 1 1/2, to rise fully and be ready for the oven.

Keep in mind, also, the characteristics of your own kitchen. If you bake bread all the time, your kitchen is full of wild yeast, and any dough you make there will rise vigorously. If you seldom bake bread, or are just beginning, your kitchen will be quite “sterile;” your dough won’t be aided by wild yeast, and will rise more slowly than it would in a more “active” kitchen.

Here are some guidelines to get you started. If you're an occasional bread baker, cut back the usual 2 to 2 ½ teaspoons of instant yeast to 1/2 to 1 teaspoon, depending on how long you want to let the dough ferment before the final shape-rise-bake process. 1/2 teaspoon would give you lots of flexibility, such as letting the dough “rest” for 16 to 20 hours; 1 teaspoon would be a good amount for an all-day or overnight rise (10 hours or so, at cool room temperature).

If you're using active dry yeast, which isn't as vigorous as instant yeast, we'd up the range to 3/4 to 1 1/2 teaspoons.

We've found that here in our King Arthur kitchen, where we bake bread every day, we can cut the yeast all the way back to 1/16 to 1/8 teaspoon in a 3-cup-of-flour recipe, and get a good overnight or all-day rise.

Use your judgment in rating your own kitchen as to “yeast friendliness.”

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipe/yeast.html

Sourdough Supreme

I think I made one of my best breads to date this week. Now I will try to do it again for Tuesday's soup kitchen supper. The secret was time, time, time, and sourdough starter. I set it up Tuesday punched it down a few times kept it refrigerated, and baked it Friday. Bread is always an adventure and always a mystery. This is what keeps me baking twice a week for decades. If I could have a bakery and not cut back on the incubation flavor developing time I could bake for the whole city. We could put Woonsocket on the map like Lionel Poilane did in France. Read about him in Smithsonian Magazine issue from 1995. I reread it yesterday and it is still amazing!
Here.
Recipe here.

Difference between French and Italian bread?

What is the difference between French bread and Italian bread?
Barry H answered
There are many differences and many similarities.

Traditional "French" bread, the baguette, is made with a dough of about 60-62% hydration -- the liquid weighs 60-62% as much as the flour weighs. It is shaped into long loaves and baked at around 425-440F with water vapor or steam in the oven.

Traditional "Italian" bread is made with a dough that has a bit more liquid, possibly some of it milk, and is shaped into large rounds and baked at about the same temperature, usually without water or steam it the oven.

The breads you bought were likely made from the same ingredients, although Italian bread may have a bit of fat, milk or sugar in it.

By law, French baguettes must be made from water, flour, yeast and salt, with a very small amount of dough improver allowed.

However, as you will see from the links below, there are endless variations in both countries, but both countries bakers make the full range of breads, from small rolls to large enriched holiday breads and just about everything in between.

There are so many regional variations within each country, from east to west and north to south that it's hard to define the differences between "French" bread and "Italian" bread. However, there are a few differences that seem to carry through.

French bakers make more rye breads than Italian bakers, since France borders Germany and the climate is a bit colder than Italy's climate.

Italian bakers use semolina flour (not meal) in quite a few breads.

My impression, and it's just that, is that Italian bakers tend to work with wetter doughs than French bakers and to bake at higher temperatures. Neither of these are scientific fact.

Below are a few links to web sites and the names of some interesting bread books to look at if you are interested in baking these breads.
http://www.artisanbreadbaking.com/
http://www.theartisan.net/
Carol Field, "The Italian Baker"
Bernard Clayton, Jr., "The Breads of France"
Christine Ingram and Jennie Shapter, "TheVCook's Guide to Bread"
Joe Ortiz, "The Village Baker"
Franco Galli, "The Il Fornaio Baking Book"
Peter Reinhart, "The Bread Baker's Apprentice"
Source

Vanessa Valliere

Start the day out right with these clips starring our friend Vanessa Valliere:

Here.

Here.

Cedar Juniper Elm Poplar Aspen Cottonwood

Some of us are feeling the pollen from these trees. I am grateful for the antihistamine, generic Excedrin and decongestants. I am happiest when the ground is frozen. Spring is painful!

Hummingbird Cake

I had never heard of a hummingbird cake before today when Francine gave us some. It is so good and I normally do not have a sweet tooth. It is a traditionally Southern recipe.
Recipe here. or here.

Overflowing Gifts

I have been broke so long
It is like living on another planet.
I don't have a penny
This is why I bake at the soup kitchen.
I bake a dozen loaves each week
I walk for miles with my dog
I write,
I dance,
I paint,
I play my accordion and my saxophone
I don't like to feel impoverished.
When I have overflowing gifts.

Home Made Mozzarella

Glenda sent me instructions on making home made mozzarella and we plan to try it. Directions here. I have made yogurt cheese for years but I have always wanted to try making my own mozzarella.

Henrik Ibsen

from Ghosts, Act 2

I almost think we're all of us Ghosts ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
- Henrik Ibsen

Pollenesia

The executive in his long black wool coat
brushes snow off his car
we are all equal in the snow, water and ice.
when we sneeze and when we laugh
and when we lay in the dirt
6 feet under

woke with a sweat
palms and soles burning
the cedar juniper and elm pollen visits me
each year at this time
asleep at 9PM,
I woke at 2:30 AM
Then ice and snow rolled off the roof
sounded like gravel dumped
over our heads
we were in bed in the dark
with the dog

I realized a poem is trying to wake me
and pollen is trying to lift me
I took Lily downstairs three flights into the snowy yard
Yesterday there were bloody wings in the snow.
The hawks are hungry, and so are the cats.
the humans want flowers to grow. I want more winter ice and snow
I love when the earth is frozen, and trees are bare, black ink branches on gray skies

black and white photographs are so much richer
we marveled at our first color TV
black and white newspapers were my preference
who needs circulars with pink hams and rump roasts of beef with yellow and green Easter eggs?
our only source of color was our lives
and then technicolor movies and Kodachrome and Polaroids

I imagined all coats were dark and gray in Russia. And sepia in Grandma's childhood.
Photo of grandma as a girl sitting on a city pony
Brooklyn cobblestones.

Tiny Blueberries

150 thousand blueberries rich
she spent the summer picking the tiny berries
while counting them, in Colbrook New Hampshire
She came home in November and gave me some berries to freeze.
Two weeks ago I knocked the bag over accidentally.
192 frozen blueberries on my kitchen floor
rolled in cat and dog hair
a winter of dirt sand salt grit
I could not throw out my friends hard labor.
Days of work in the hot sun, harvesting.
I swept them up into my black metal dustpan and rinsed them fifty times in the copper colander
my patient husband took out every dog and cat hair.
they sat in a Mason jar in the fridge until yesterday
I buzzed the berries with an over ripe banana and orange juice and yogurt in the blender
delicious purple
we will have super immunity
from drinking the floor

Tracy K. Smith

When your own sweet father died
You woke before first light
And ate half a plate of eggs and grits,
And drank a glass of milk.
After you’d left, I sat in your place
And finished the toast bits with jam
And the cold eggs, the thick bacon
Flanged in fat, savoring the taste.

- Tracy K. Smith, from Life on Mars, Graywolf Press

Eggs Scrambled and baked in Muffin Tins

Beat eggs add veggies or cheese or meat favorites: I used frozen corn, frozen peas, chopped red onion, Adobo, milk. I baked them in nonstick greased muffin tins at 350 until done. I did not pre-heat I threw them into cold oven. Good with tiny roasted potatoes.
Yum!

Bob Hicok

A Wedding Night

by Bob Hicok

A groom goes out with a pillow to where the sheep
are white bushes across the hill. Dirty white

bushes across the hill and places his pillow
at the top, just before the top, a few inches

from the top for his head so he can see, almost, yes,
he can see the curve of the earth, out

where there is only water. But there is a ship
on the only water, on the curve of water

to his left and right, as the dirty white bushes
move, as the ship moves to the east

along the curve, and he thinks of how his pillow
will smell in his bed, beside his bride,

of grass and seasalt and the curve of the earth
and coming home, she will breathe all of these

when she leans over him, drapes his face
with the night of her hair, the curve of her

falling to all sides, from a center, from a moon,
from an asking, from a giving, from now on.


Bob Hicok, from Iron Horse Literary Review

Sonia Sanchez

c'mon man hold me
touch me before time love me
from behind your eyes

-Sonia Sanchez

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pathways

Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Billy Collins

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

-Billy Collins

Tea

by
Carol Ann Duffy

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.


- Carol Ann Duffy from Rapture, Picador, 2005

Chinese Envy

My Jewish grandparents ate Chinese food on Brighton Beach Avenue every night. I always say I have Chinese envy. I lived in Chinatown briefly in high school. My friend Lisa Chune taught me how to cook Chinese food. She grew up learning how to cook from her parents who ran a Chinese restaurant in Queens.

I love the fast and simple vegetable-heavy meals. They are friendly! Last night I made spicy garlic Chinese broccoli with almonds and bites of chicken for Bill. The only thing missing was water chestnuts.

Lisa taught me how to make dumplings years ago when she visited us. I showed her how to make bread and yogurt.

New Favorite: Raw or Cooked

Chopped napa cabbage, chopped red onions, peanut butter, vinegar, rooster sauce, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce.

Tuna Balsamic Surprise

I opened a can of tuna and sprinkled balsamic vinegar on top. I opened the fridge and took the leftover chick peas, corn and peas in tomato puree and added it to the tuna. It was spectacular! My husband agreed. Next time we will make this on purpose.

Spring is Here!

I just made 4 braided loaves of sourdough wheat bread and a vat of tomato sauce and ten pounds of whole wheat pasta for the community supper tonight. I had the whole gigantic kitchen to myself. I loved it.

My 85 year old student Betty, showed up for a half hour with her brother Bill. That was perfect, and she brought new pot holders. She read my mind. I was just thinking that we needed some.

On the way home I said hello to Cyndi at the new diner. The place was packed!

Spring is here!

The robins are out and they are sooooo fat!