![The mysteries of white flour and how it becomes the ‘staff of life’](https://lakevillejournal.com/media-library/image.jpg?id=48202618&width=980&quality=90)
Photo by Cynthia Hochswender
I used to think of white flour as the food equivalent of printer paper: White and bland and not very nutritious.
Two things have given me increased respect for the powdery white stuff.
One is that when bears break into our kitchens, they seem to always end up with white flour on their noses. To me that’s as if a burglar broke into your house and went straight for the white printer paper. It’s perplexing and intriguing and makes me wonder, “Hmmm, what is there about white printer paper that I don’t understand?”
The other is that, like all the rest of you, I started making sourdough starter and bread at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. That wasn’t especially good timing, since of course both bread and starter require flour, and flour was in short supply until about two weeks ago.
Anyway, through a number of stealthy and clever maneuvers I have put together a large supply of King Arthur all-purpose flour, King Arthur bread flour, Maine Grains whole wheat flour and (as of last week) rye flour.
Creating new life
When you bake pastry, flour is just a means to an end: You need flour if you want to have cakes, cookies and pie crust.
When you make sourdough starter and you bake bread, you realize that flour is alive. Or rather (forgive me, I’m not a scientist): Flour used to be alive when it was wheat. It is no longer alive once it’s been milled into flour.
But something magical (Frankenstein’s monster?) occurs when you mix flour with water. The two of them combined entice bacteria to join them from the air and the result is a living, breathing substance called sourdough starter.
It’s important to note that good sourdough starter eats healthy bacteria that’s already in the air in your house (or your favorite bakery). There can also be bad bacteria on your flour, because wheat isn’t heavily cleansed before it is milled. That means it could be tainted with, for example, E. Coli from an animal relieving itself on a wheat stalk. For that reason, unless you’re a bear, you should not eat raw flour.
Wheat flour can, of course, also make anyone sick who is gluten intolerant. There are many other types of alternative flours. There isn’t room enough here to go into detail about all of them. But one thing I do feel confident about, even though I’m not a scientist, is that if you’re only vaguely gluten intolerant, your body will cope better with fresh bread, made either in a bakery or at home, rather than factory-made bread: The slower your flour transitions into bread, the easier it is for your body to absorb the gluten.
So many kinds of flour …
We are going to focus for the purposes of this article on the flours that lend themselves most easily to the creation of sourdough starter and, then, bread.
Last spring, I read multiple articles about people deciding to learn to bake bread during the COVID-19 quarantine. This led almost immediately to a shortage of flour, and also to a shortage of yeast for baking.
That kind of yeast comes in little cubes or packets. It’s a very easy, reliable method for making dough rise. It has been used for centuries all around the world and is especially useful for professional bakers, who need to wake up in the morning and make a set number of loaves that need to be more or less identical.
If you don’t have packaged yeast and if you are OK with your bread production being a little unpredictable, you can make sourdough starter and use it instead of yeast.
The process is very simple: You mix together water and flour and leave them out on the counter and, after a few days, you have starter and all you have to do is feed it daily with more flour and water. When you’re ready, you use it as the base for your bread dough.
It sounded simple, so I decided to try it myself. I figured then I could explain the technique to readers who were not able to find yeast but wanted to make bread.
That was back in about March. It’s now September and while I have managed to make excellent starter and, from it, really good bread, I have learned only one thing about making sourdough starter (and bread): It’s infinitely complicated and there are infinite ways to do it. Or rather, it’s incredibly simple and will work like a charm up until the minute that it stops working, and then you have to figure out another method.
Raising sourdough starter is like raising a child. Many people even animate their starter by giving it a name, or by taking it on vacation or sending it away to sourdough starter summer camp (not kidding).
It’s not necessary to get that wrapped up in your sourdough; and if you find it starting to take over your life, you can tuck it in the refrigerator. Once you do that, it’s like a houseplant and only needs to be fed and watered once a week.
I’m going to send you to the internet to get the instructions on how to make your starter. Again, they’re not complicated but every day is slightly different during the first week, and it would take up too much space here to explain it. I like the technique at Clever Carrot’s website (www.theclevercarrot.com “Beginner sourdough starter”). But there are lots of good methods out there. You can never go wrong with seeking guidance from the King Arthur Flour website, for example.
Helpful tips: What to buy
So I won’t tell you how to make starter from scratch — but I will tell you which supplies I’ve found to be useful.
Everyone who makes sourdough starter has their own things they like and methods they prefer.
But universally, one product that will make your bread-baking life easier is a small food scale. Scales are pretty similar, they all cost about $15 and they all do roughly the same thing. I bought one by Escali recently and it’s a cut above the other brands, in my experience.
Once you begin making starter, you’ll need to store it someplace. I have found that the Ball and Mason jars are too hard to clean; once the sourdough drips on your jar dry and get hard, they turn almost to stone. The Ball and Mason versions have a lot of pattern in their glass and once the sourdough gets into those nooks and crannies you almost need dynamite to get rid of it (or of course a long soak in warm water followed by a cleansing in the dishwasher).
I prefer the Weck jars, which are easy to clean and look nice in the kitchen (Weck 742 Mold Jar, .5 Liter; set of six: $40).
Which flours and why
Most important is your choice of flour and water.
I apologize to the planet and to all of us who are worried about its future but you really need to use a good quality bottled water for this; most tap water has bleach or other chemicals in it.
You also want a flour that doesn’t have bleach in it. Organic flours work well but aren’t essential, in my opinion.
I started out using King Arthur all-purpose flour, which worked great until it stopped working (bakers, by the way, prefer King Arthur because it has more protein than most of the other store brands and protein is very important to your bread and your starter).
My starter pooped out after a few weeks of just eating the all-purpose flour. I did some experiments and eventually found a very good organic whole wheat flour from Maine Grains. I shared some with my friend Anne, who reported that it made her starter go “berserk.”
That eventually pooped out too. Next I used a mix of 50% Maine Grains whole wheat and 50% King Arthur bread flour (which has even more protein than the all-purpose flour). I’m mixing it because I only have about 20 pounds of the Maine Grains, in my freezer, and I’m trying to make it last.
However, over the weekend I fed my starter some rye flour from Arrowhead Mills that I found at the Sharon Farm Market in the shopping plaza. The starter got very excited about the change in diet and got very big and bubbly on the first day, but then it calmed down on the second day.
The proof is in the bread, however, and the loaf I baked with that rye flour starter is especially delicious (photo above).
The bread I’ve been making with the whole wheat/bread flour starter has a definite sour tang to it, even though the dough itself is a mix of King Arthur all-purpose and bread flours.
The bread made with the rye starter just tastes deliciously like homemade bread. No tang.
I prefer it, honestly, to the bread made with the whole wheat-based starter. No doubt this will change over time —because the one constant in bread baking seems to be that nothing is constant.
Abstract art display in Wassaic for Upstate Art Weekend, July 18-21.
WASSAIC — Art enthusiasts from all over the country flocked to the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley to participate in Upstate Art Weekend, which ran from July 18 to July 21.
The event, which “celebrates the cultural vibrancy of Upstate New York”, included 145 different locations where visitors could enjoy and interact with art.
On Saturday, July 20, The Wassaic Project hosted numerous community events. Will Hutnick, the director of artistic programming, said “We’ve been a part of it since the beginning, this is the fifth year of UPAW.”
Most of the action was based at Maxon Mills, the seven-floor grain mill located in the heart of Wassaic. On exhibit was work from 30 artists, 18 of whom were past residents of The Wassaic Project. “Artists can come and do a residency here, meaning they live and work with one another for a couple months at a time,” Hutnick stated.
The first floor held work by Petra Szilagyi, who uses dirt and linseed oil to construct images of paranormal concepts, most of which include bats. They reflected that a recent trip to a fifth sense competition in Vietnam was the influence behind the exhibit.
Across the floor was Tiffany Smith’s interactive installation which incorporated plants and wicker chairs, all of which were objects associated with her Carribean upbringing. “The room being filled with plants is symbolic of hurricane prep which often included bringing the plants from outside into the house,” Smith said.
As visitors made their way up the narrow wooden stairs, music could be heard from behind the walls. The echoing music was Daniel Shieh’s installation, entitled Mother’s Anthem, which played a recording of the American Anthem in 30 languages. The languages ranged from Spanish and Italian to Navajo and Bengali.
Each floor was filled with artwork of all mediums, including painting, fibers, collage and photography. Rachel Bussières, who switched her concentration after watching the 2017 solar eclipse, uses varying light sources to produce lumen prints. During the wildfires, she recounted that she “made a new exposure each day to capture the changing air quality”.
Luciana Abait also incorporates the natural world into her pieces, instead using maps. An environmental activist originally from Argentina, Abait’s work highlights “environmental fragility, specifically the impacts it has on immigrants.” Her installation that is currently on display at Maxon Mills, takes the form of a mountain range built solely from maps of the US and Argentina.
Throughout the day, visitors could “Arm Wrestle 4 A Popsicle”. Winners had the choice of 3 playfully flavored trout-inspired popsicles - Nightcrawler, Power Bait, and Salmon Roe. Artist Katie Peck, who spent the day in costume as a rainbow trout, encouraged guests to step up and try their hand at an arm wrestle.
Shibori Indigo dyeing, group meditation, and dance workshops were open for community members of all ages as well.
While the daytime activities fostered appreciation of fixed art, a dance party until midnight at The Lantern Inn offered guests a space for performative art.
When describing the environment of The Wassaic Project, Smith emphasized, “It’s all community, it’s all love.”
A serene scene from the Amenia garden tour.
AMENIA — The much-anticipated annual Amenia Garden Tour drew a steady stream of visitors to admire five local gardens on Saturday, July 13, each one demonstrative of what a green thumb can do. An added advantage was the sense of community as neighbors and friends met along the way.
Each garden selected for the tour presented a different garden vibe. Phantom’s Rock, the garden of Wendy Goidel, offered a rocky terrain and a deep rock pool offering peaceful seclusion and anytime swims. Goidel graciously welcomed visitors and answered questions about the breathtaking setting.
Amenia Finance Director Charlie Miller welcomed visitors to his Bog Hollow Road garden in Wassaic, a manicured expansive yard with well-placed garden beds framing a far-reaching view. He said he plans carefully each winter for the next spring’s improvement.
The organic, environmentally responsible Maitri Farm was next, a lesson in coordinating agriculture with natural balance. The farm stand and a walk among the greenhouses brought visitors together.
Near the center of Amenia was the garden of Polly Pitts-Garvin, offering a chance to visit a robust vegetable garden with raised beds to be envious of and a remarkable absence of any insects or usual vegetable garden problems.
At Chez Cheese, the vast garden acreage surrounding the 1850s historic home of Joan Feeney and Bruce Phillips in Millerton, visitors could begin at refreshment stations where walking tour maps of the 15-acre property were available. There were streams and ponds with docks, and a dozen bridges arranged around the landscape. In the 19th-century, the property had been the home of the Wilson Cheese Factory, inspiring the name of the estate.
The Amenia Garden Tour was supported this year by Paley’s Garden Center in Sharon.
Gary Dodson working a tricky pool on the Schoharie Creek, hoping to lure something other than a rock bass from the depths.
PRATTSVILLE, N.Y. — The Schoharie Creek, a fabled Catskill trout stream, has suffered mightily in recent decades.
Between pressure from human development around the busy and popular Hunter Mountain ski area, serious flooding, and the fact that the stream’s east-west configuration means it gets the maximum amount of sunlight, the cool water required for trout habitat is simply not as available as in the old days.
This is not a new phenomenon. It does seem to be getting worse, though.
Gary Dodson and I convened where the creek makes its final run into the Schoharie reservoir, part of the New York City water supply system, on a semi-broiling Thursday afternoon, July 11.
The goal was simple. Catch smallmouth bass, which abound in the lower section of the river.
This was hot stuff — as in an 80-degree water temperature.
The air temperature was actually slightly less at 77.
After negotiating the intensely slippery rocks, festooned with treacherous algae, the first major pool presented several difficulties, with a back eddy competing with a main flow and several large trees draped about the whole thing.
I hit on the simplest strategy, which was to flip a weighted attractor fly called a Tequilley into the start of the eddy so it would proceed slowly but steadily into the maelstrom, sinking all the while.
This worked. A proper adult smallmouth, with bronze coloring and vertical stripes, took the thing.
The point-and-shoot camera finally died, however, and I was not going to try to fumble my phone out for a nice but routine fish photo.
Why not?
Because I guarantee the fish would have made a sudden, last-moment bolt for freedom, causing me to drop the device into the drink.
Gary moved downstream while I continued trying to annoy the residents of the pool, succeeding a couple of times with different colored Wooly Buggers.
Then we all got bored and I moved off, where Gary was catching rock bass and cussing them out for not being something else.
I have to admit, they are not the most compelling critters. Something about the red eyes.
This latest trip was dominated by extremely tedious and distasteful Harry Homeowner activities, but on both Wednesday and Thursday mornings I prowled Woodland Valley Creek. By “morning” I mean “dawn,” because that was when the water temps were down to a barely acceptable 64.
I made the acquaintance of several stocked browns and of a handful of their wild cousins. The wild fish are smaller and nimbler.
The successful ploy was an Adams wet fly, size 16, drifted behind something big, like a Parachute Adams or Stimulator.