Our friends at Zone 7 have procured some wheat berries from Oak Grove Mills in Pittstown, NJ. They arrived at Arturo's two weeks ago and since then we have been hard at work! We milled the wheat berries by hand with our new, not-so-fancy grain mill. After milling, we were left with a whole wheat flour that was unlike any flour I had ever seen. The grind was course and it seemed like the color was darker than the whole wheat flours I've used in the past. Maybe it's because I milled the flour myself. Or maybe it's because I know the farmers who grew the wheat and I am friends with the middleman who delivered it. But, I am positive that this flour is far superior to any that I've ever seen. Only a few hands have ever touched this flour and the distance between the raw earth and our bread is as short as it gets. This mentality of utilizing an ingredient grown so close to its final destination is indicative of the true principles and ideology behind AUTHENTIC Italian food. It's not about a recipe or a particular dish. It's about ingredients and technique. Find the best product and learn how to cook it. Clearly, I'm excited about this flour.
So now we have freshly milled whole wheat flour. We then mixed the flour with an equal amount of water and mixed vigorously to incorporate as much air as possible into the pancake-like batter. We left this to sit for 24 hours after which we discarded half of the mix. We added more flour and water to the remaining half and let it sit for another 24 hours. We repeated this for days and each time, bubbles grew more numerous and more rapidly. By the seventh day, it was obvious that the starter was fully active. Within three hours of feeding the culture, it had doubled in size and its smell changed from acidic to sweet and milky. A few hours after that, the starter deflated and smelled acidic again. This is the cycle of a wild yeast culture. It was now hungry and ready to ferment a batch of dough.
I mixed the first batch of dough at 2 pm yesterday and let it ferment for a full 24 hours. I then shaped a loaf of bread and let it proof in a cloth-lined basket. While I was at it, I cut off a small piece and rolled it into a ball for what would become a pizza (my dinner). The dough proofed (secondary fermentation) for another four hours. Then, I threw my cast iron pot into the oven to preheat and started stretching my pizza. I topped it with just a few cubes of our handmade fresh mozzarella, sea salt and extra virgin olive oil. I made sure that our wood ovens were cranked up to 800 degrees and baked the little pie. It came out of the oven just a few minutes later and was just as I like it: Crispy and deeply caramelized on the outside, tender on the inside with big, open holes in its structure. The colors on the outside ranged from golden to auburn to the darkest browns; the inside was a creamy off-white that could only be achieved with a thorough understanding of proper bread making technique. The toppings obviously were not important to me at this point. They were like ketchup on a french fry: accentuation but definitely not necessary if you have a great french fry. The soul of pizza is the gentile manipulation of flour and coaxing it into something etherial through a complete understanding and execution of proper fermentation.
After I had eaten my dinner, the cast iron pot was thoroughly preheated and ready to go. I swiftly flipped the dough from its proofing basket into the pot and quickly covered it. I gently pushed the tightly-covered pot into our wood fired oven for a quick twenty minute bake. I curiously removed the lid and was amazed at the sight of this beautiful loaf of bread!! It still needed another 25 minutes or so of baking to properly caramelize and dry the crust.
I cannot explain the level of satisfaction that I took from this whole process. We've created something so innately human from the grain of what was once a wild grass. As I learn more about the fermentation process and of bread making technique, I find myself more intrigued and ready to dig deeper.