Here is an article that I found in the San Francisco Chronicle today ..
Bread Revolution
Bay Area bakers changed how we think about our daily bread
Karola Saekel
Sunday, May 20, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2001/05/20/CM230884.DTL
Learn Your Loaves
Here are brief definitions of some of the most common artisan breads
produced by Bay Area bakeries.
Baguette. Long, narrow yeasted French bread loaf with a crisp crust and
slightly chewy interior punctuated by many air holes. Made in sourdough and
sweet versions (sweet - as in not sour), sometimes studded with a mixture
of seeds; it's best eaten the day it's baked.
Batarde. Similar to a baguette but with a larger circumference and lower
percentage of crust vs. interior.
Brioche. (Not pictured.) A light-textured yeasted French bread rich in eggs
and milk with a soft crust, traditionally made in individual loaves roughly
the size of muffins, with a fluted base and topknot ball of dough. It can
also be made in large loaves generally weighing 12 to 16 ounces. Brioche
dough is often used to encase savory fillings.
Challah. Traditional yeasted Jewish egg bread similar in texture to
brioche. The classic challah is braided, glazed with egg white and often
sprinkled with sesame or poppy seeds.
Ciabatta. A wide, rather flat yeasted Italian loaf so named because its
shape supposedly resembles a slipper (ciabatta in Italian). It has a thin
crust, dusted with flour, and an airy crumb.
Focaccia. A relative of pizza, this flat Italian yeast bread usually
incorporates olive oil, with more oil drizzled over its dimpled top. The
bread is often topped with rosemary or other herbs, or sun-dried tomatoes.
Focaccia has become a favorite for Mediterranean-style sandwiches.
Levain. Made with natural fermentation, utilizing wild rather then
commercial yeasts, pain au levain (its full name) comes in round or oval
loaves with a rustic character - large, uneven holes and assertive grain
flavor, partly due to small amounts of whole wheat or rye flours.
Pain de mie. Virtually identical to a Pullman loaf, this yeasted bread
often contains a small amount of sugar, butter and milk. It is baked in
lidded pans, which result in perfectly square loaves with a dense crumb
that can be sliced very thinly for dainty sandwiches or Melba toast.
Panini. A sandwich roll of Italian-style yeasted bread. Panino means sandwich.
Pugliese. Often incorporating olive oil, this rustic Italian loaf is
similar to ciabatta, with large holes and good grain flavor.
- K.S.
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Bread was my single biggest disappointment when I first set foot in the
United States some 50 years ago. Post-World War II Europeans saw America as
the land of milk and honey. Well, there was nothing wrong with the milk and
the honey, but the bread was another story.
In my Midwestern college days, the choice was between white and so-called
whole wheat (almost indistinguishable from white except for a less
appetizing muddy color).
Things improved when I eventually ended up in San Francisco. Here, at
least, there was the alternative of sourdough French bread - crusty,
chewable and with flavor and an aroma that said "bread" rather than
"industrial byproduct."
There wasn't much in the way of sandwich bread, though, except for the
occasional neighborhood bakery that turned out an acceptable if
undistinguished Pullman loaf.
Then came the '70s: antiwar protests, Flower Power, Earth consciousness,
food conspiracies and a turning away from anything produced by corporate
America. A lot of people - especially those who had not yet reached the
despicable age of 30 - started baking their own bread, with whole grains,
molasses, honey and home-brewed starters. Most of it was awful.
But those trial efforts paved the way. In the 1980s, it suddenly seemed
like some wild yeast had descended on the Bay Area, giving rise to a bread
revolution. Almost overnight, a bevy of bakers started crafting
European-style loaves, and wonderful bread became an alternative to
Wonderbread.
Suddenly, the buzz among restaurantgoers and discriminating shoppers was
all about bread. Baguette, until then a rather rarefied term, became as
commonplace as doughnut. Batarde, panini, ciabatta, pain de mie, focaccia,
brioche and pugliese established themselves in our bread baskets.
There may be as many reasons quoted for this sea change in baking as there
are practitioners of the craft (65 microbakeries in the Bay Area alone,
according to industry sources, and that doesn't include in-store bakeries
at such markets as Whole Foods and Andronico's).
Steve Sullivan, co-founder of high-profile Acme Bread Co. in Berkeley,
believes that consumers will always choose the best from what they are offered.
In the dark ages of American bread, the mid-20th century, when
mass-produced, packaged bread ruled the roost, Americans used bread for
sopping up gravy and as a wrapper for equally mass-produced lunch meats, he
says. The bread readily available was adequate for those purposes.
With Californians in unprecedented numbers having traveled to Europe, where
they feasted on traditional breads, the time was ripe for giving them
similar choices on their home turf.
Sullivan, who started as a bus boy at Chez Panisse in 1973, the same year
he enrolled at UC Berkeley, eventually became the restaurant's baker and,
in 1983, cofounded Acme, specializing in crisp-crusted baguettes and other
European-style breads.
His baking confrere, Glenn Mitchell, and Mitchell's wife, Cynthia, started
Grace Baking Co. at Market Hall in Oakland's Rockridge district in 1987,
right after the Wall Street Journal wrote that smart money would open a
bakery now. The couple proved the venerable financial sheet correct. Grace,
now operating from a huge state-of-the-art, highly mechanized facility in
Richmond, has become the Bay Area market leader in terms of production and
range of distribution. Alone among local artisanal bakeries, Grace has
expanded to stores as far away as Alaska and Montana. To give far-flung
customers freshly baked bread, Grace employs a prebake method in which
not-quite-finished bread is pulled from the oven, frozen, shipped and then
"baked off" at the point of sale.
Mitchell insists that nothing is lost in the process. The breads are slow-
risen - one of the techniques essential for the development of artisan
breads' texture and flavor - and the initial baking actually produces an
edible, if rather pale, loaf. In adopting this nontraditional technique,
Grace is following another industry leader, Los Angeles' La Brea Bakery.
That outfit's prebaked baguettes, available at Whole Foods markets here,
actually won first place against local competition in a Chronicle Food
section Taster's Choice test a few years ago.
Other bakers, without criticizing Grace, won't go this route, preferring
methods that hark back to hundreds of years of European and colonial
American baking practices. Many of them let round loaves rise in baskets,
as is traditional in France. One of the few nods to modern technology is a
certain amount of climate control. Starters are often kept in
refrigerators, and measures are taken to counteract huge swings in
temperature and humidity, which can wreak havoc on yeast doughs, with dry
air the worst enemy.
"Every night at 3 a.m. we check the National Weather Service," says Mike
Rose of Semifreddi's. Adjustments are made to pamper the dough which, as
Rose points out, is a living thing until it's slid into the oven.
Semifreddi's is a family affair. Tom Frainier, a refugee from the corporate
world, owns the company, with his sister Barbara and her husband, Michael Rose.
Together the threesome has taken the bakery from its 1984 beginnings in a
barely 500-square-foot storefront in Kensington to its current nearly
20,000-square-foot plant in Emeryville.
Except for size, little has changed. "We have no investors," says Frainier,
"so we can do things on our terms." Those terms embrace old-fashioned,
largely manual production methods and a business philosophy that includes
profit sharing and cash bonuses for employees.
The owners take a purist approach to bread making, using just flour, water,
yeast and salt, except in a few special items like challah.
"We don't put things like cheese in our bread," says Frainier, in keeping
with his opinion that bread should complement food, not be the whole show.
Frainier and Rose credit pioneers in other food-related enterprises with
reawakening consumers' appreciation of all sorts of honest, real food,
including bread - people like Robert Mondavi (wine), Alfred Peet (coffee)
and Fritz Maytag (beer).
When pressed, they will name Acme as their closest competitor (the
companies both operate in the $7 million to $8 million annual range), but
it's a respectful and friendly competition, they say.
The mutual respect among these bakers is particularly noteworthy since this
is what Semifreddi's Rose calls the most competitive food area in the
world. Then again, there are many connections among these bakers.
Semifreddi's was founded in 1983 by Eric and Carol Sartenaer (now owners of
Phoenix Pastificio pasta shop and cafe in Berkeley). They had worked at
Berkeley's Cheese Board collective, one of the pioneers of the artisan
bread movement. The Sartenaers sold Semifreddi's in 1987 to two employees,
one of whom was Barbara Frainier Rose.
Grace Baking was the proving ground for the Ponsford siblings, Craig and
Elizabeth, who went on to open Sonoma's acclaimed Artisan Bakers in '92.
The Ponsfords have a strong French orientation, bringing in consulting
bakers from France every so often. (In a nice twist, Craig and his breads
won the World Cup of Baking competition in Paris in 1996 and he coached the
gold medal-winning U.S. team in '99.)
Elizabeth Ponsford finds no surprise in the fact that artisan breads thrive
in Northern California. Californians, she says, are the most educated in
the country when it comes to eating. "They are used to the highest quality
food across the board."
Which means that they think locally baked fresh batarde, pugliese,
baguettes and ciabatta are the greatest thing, well, since sliced bread.
Karola Saekel is a staff writer in the Chronicle food department.
(c)2001 San Francisco Chronicle