April 1 is National Sourdough Day. No fooling.
The curators at NationalDayCalendar.com mark occasions to commemorate every day, and Saturday is sourdough’s turn. (Today, you could toast lemon chiffon cake, manatees and mom-and-pop business owners, for instance.)
Of course, mom-and-pop business owners Jeff Cleary and Kathy Mullen pay homage to sourdough every day at their artisan bakery, Grateful Bread Company, in Golden.
This Saturday, the bread-mongers will step up their ongoing tribute to sourdough with a large variety of fresh baked breads and pastries featuring the special ingredient they’ve been carefully cultivating since Y2K: their all-natural sourdough starter.
Seven days a week, they bake for local chefs, but on Saturdays Grateful Bread also opens to the public from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Perfect timing for National Sourdough Day.
“We make both milder flavored and stronger San Francisco-style sourdoughs using in-house stone-milled organic flours mixed with bread flour from King Arthur,” said Cleary, Grateful Bread’s founder and head baker. “The lavender sourdough we make for chef Jennifer Jasinski’s restaurant Rioja has a stronger sourdough flavor, and our peat-smoked barley has a more subtle tang, for example.”
The bakers at Grateful Bread also make eight types of pastries with sourdough, including a dazzling dark Belgian chocolate babka. All are made with natural and organic ingredients, largely from local sources like Motherlove Organic Farm in Fort Collins, Vivian Farms in Littleton, and Beeyond the Hive honey farm in Elizabeth.
The bakery’s 23 trained artisans are busy bees themselves, working around the clock in three shifts, 365 days a year making sourdoughs and other breads for more than 80 chef-driven restaurants in Denver and Boulder. Cleary launched the company in 2005 in a tiny cabin in Evergreen, working to gain enough clients to hire help and lease the current 8,000-square- foot space off West Colfax Avenue.
A team of delivery truck drivers transport Grateful Bread’s fresh-baked loaves, baguettes, epis, rolls and boules twice daily to restaurants like Acorn, Fruition, Guard & Grace and Tables in time for lunch and again for dinner service in a bee-line pattern efficiency experts would frown on.
“Our guiding principle is quality above everything else,” said Mullen. “From the beginning, we committed to results over profits. So rather than finding the fastest, cheapest ways to produce and sell bread, we chose artisan techniques for a business approach we can take pride in.”
To that end, Cleary imported a custom-built artisan stone mill from Austria in 2015 for even more quality control. Employee Luke Holland was inspired to learn the milling process to become the company’s head miller.
“I love it,” Holland said. “I get to be one of the few artisan millers in Colorado, using this beautiful pinewood stone mill to make the best flours in town.”
The person entrusted with one of the most important jobs in the bakery is Ashlee Brinkerhoff — or “Mrs. B,” as Cleary calls her. Brinkerhoff came to Grateful Bread as an intern from Johnson & Wales University’s baking and pastry arts program six years ago, and never left. She is one of the few who tends to the bakery’s nine large buckets of sourdough starter, the source of the magic.
Bakers speak about their starters as living characters with exacting temperaments. They strive to keep them well-fed and warm, and they listen to them, because “the starter tells you when it’s happy.” Cleary said the smell of a starter changes throughout the year due to weather conditions. “At its best, it smells like green apples.”
Starter is a simple mix of unbleached flour and filtered warm water that has attracted wild yeast spores from the surrounding atmosphere. The spores are microscopic living organisms that feed on the mix, causing it to ferment and, over time, with proper care and feeding it will eventually sour. Carbon dioxide bubbles develop in the mix when the process is working. At that point, a portion can be taken and added to more flour, water and salt to start a sour bread dough that will rise. Without starter, you get flat bread.
Grateful Bread keeps two types of starter: a wet starter for milder products and a firm one for stronger flavored breads.
Brinkerhoff meticulously charts temperatures to calculate the precise formulas needed to maintain the starters’ optimal ratios. Using large mixers, she creates the dough for orders that will bake in three days, following a disciplined routine of mixing, resting, turning and ultimately dividing the dough for bakers to shape by hand into hundreds of individual pieces. Good Mixers like Mrs. B have solid math skills, strong focus, endurance and an artist’s touch.
Finishing breads has become second nature for a.m. head baker John Groundwater, who gives each raw loaf a final dusting of flour and maybe a few quick decorative slashes before pushing them into the deck oven. At just the right time and temp, he deftly slides them back out with a long handled wooden peel, making it look easy.
“It takes a lot of repetition and practice to get good at it,” Cleary said. “Baking is a science. You experiment until you find the right balance and then you stick to the formula.”
Science has yet to confirm the claims of those who believe sourdough breads are as good as gluten-free for people with sensitivities to the proteins in wheat products. Anecdotally, Mullen says numerous customers have told her sourdoughs don’t bother them the way other breads do. Speculation centers around sourdough’s longer fermentation time, suggesting the process results in a healthier product.
“Sourdough is an area of enormous controversy,” states the King Arthur Flour website, not only regarding its nutritional benefits but also in terms of the best techniques for making it. America’s oldest flour company has a hotline for home bread-bakers, sourdough questions being a top subject they address daily at kingarthurflour.com.
Denver Wellness and Nutrition Team dietician Jessica Crandall, RDN, advises her gluten-sensitive patients to watch serving size, and remember everyone has a different tolerance level. “Low processed foods are great, fermented foods can be beneficial, but bread is still bread,” said Crandall, who believes the oven likely kills whatever good bacteria exists in sourdoughs. While she doesn’t view sourdough as a health food, she personally loves it for the flavor. “It’s delicious!”
Sourdough has been around since biblical times, when it was just called bread. The lack of it has caused riots over the centuries, and inspired poets like Neruda and Browning and quotes from the likes of Julia Child, who Cleary had the privilege of cooking for in 1995. Child famously asked, “How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?”
Grateful Bread seeks to answer that challenge daily, training a new generation of bakers and millers in an ancient practice to make American bread great again.
Freelancer Kristen Kidd is working on her master’s in marketing at DU and can be reached at kiddstories@gmail.com.
Creating a sourdough starter requires time and attention. Here’s how Grateful Bread’s Jeff Cleary recommends doing it:
What you need:
- Whole wheat flour
- Unbleached bread flour
- Filtered water
- Glass jar or non-reactive container
Directions:
1. Mix flour (preferably organic, freshly milled) and water together by hand or with a stand mixer on low speed until well blended. Leave for 24 hours at room temperature in a food-safe container such as a glass jar.
2. Discard half of the mixture and stir in another 4 ounces of water, then add 6 ounces of unbleached bread flour and mix thoroughly. Let sit for another 24 hours.
3. Reserve 4 ounces of the mixture and repeat the process of adding 4 ounces of water and 6 ounces of bread flour. Continue “feeding” the starter every 12 hours, repeating the same amounts of flour and water each time.
4. After 1 week, the starter should smell slightly acidic with a noticeable amount of bubbling.
5. Mix 2 ounces of the starter with 5 ounces of water and 8½ ounces of bread flour. Store on a door shelf inside the refrigerator to mature for 3 days (the back of the fridge can be too cold).
6. After this, the starter should be ready to use in your bread formula. Always reserve enough starter to feed for your next batch or you will have to create a new one from scratch. To maintain the starter, feed it 1 cup of unbleached bread flour and ½ cup of filtered water about once a week going forward.
NOTE: Several variables will affect how a starter performs: temperature, humidity, and brand and type of flour. No baker can tell you exactly how to make your starter perform best. Experimentation and experience will be your greatest teachers. Try different combinations of variables to find what works best in your kitchen.
King Arthur Flour offers a staffed hotline for answers about starters and bread baking 855-371-BAKE (2253) or online at kingarthurflour.com.
Bread-baking tips from the pros
Jeff Cleary began baking bread in Pennsylvania where he ran his first bakery out of an old train station at the age of 15. In Denver, he saw a need for good breads in the growing restaurant scene and launched Grateful Bread to be the top choice of the city’s best chefs, before adding a retail component.
“With cooking, you can improvise and substitute ingredients, change things on the fly,” said Cleary. “Baking is formula-based, and if you alter the formula it usually doesn’t work out. It’s rare to get bread right the first time you try, and it takes years to develop a feel for all the variables and how they work together.”
Cleary’s top tips for home bakers:
• Use a kitchen scale vs. measuring cups for true accuracy
• Take notes when you bake so you can repeat successful results
• Patience! Good baking can’t be rushed
• Practice, practice, practice
• High altitude has greater impact on quick breads like banana bread, but you may need to increase water, reduce yeast and/or shorten proofing time when baking breads in Colorado.
Steve Redzikowski is the chef/owner of Denver restaurants Acorn and Brider and Boulder’s Oak at Fourteenth, and is a 2017 finalist for the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Southwest region. Redzikowski chose Grateful Bread’s country sourdough to serve at Acorn as table bread, diced and toasted in a summer tomato panzanella salad as well as savory bread puddings served with chicken.
“Bread is one of the hardest things to get right because of all the little touches in the process,” said Redzikowski. “It’s simple in that it’s just flour, water and a starter or yeast. Seems like something with so few ingredients should be easy, but it’s not!
“I’m from New York, and I love a good golden brown crusty sourdough that doesn’t look like it came out of a machine. Everyone eats with their eyes first.”
Redzikowski’s tips for home bakers:
• Get good at just a few breads; don’t try to make them all at once
• The temperature in your kitchen will impact proofing time; watch the dough
Grateful Bread Company’s San Francisco Style Sourdough
Ingredients
- 2 pounds, 4¼ ounces King Arthur Bread Flour
- 22 ounces water
- 10¾ ounces Ripe Sourdough Starter (can order from King Arthur)
- Weigh out, and keep 1 ounce sea salt or kosher salt separate
Equipment
- Stand mixer with a dough hook
- Cast iron pan
- Bread-proofing basket (often called a banneton)
- Bread peel
- Baking stone
- Razor blade
Directions
Mix the bread flour, water and sourdough starter, ideally using a stand mixer with a dough hook, for 2 minutes. Leave the mixing bowl and hook on the mixer and cover the bowl with plastic wrap; let rest for 30 minutes. (This process is called autolyse, which allows the water to hydrate the flour and the enzymes to break down the flour’s proteins.)
Add the salt and mix on low for 2 minutes, then increase to medium speed for another 2 minutes. Remove the bowl and hook from the mixer, leave the dough in the mixing bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. Rest for 20 minutes.
Take the dough out of the bowl and place on a floured surface. Turn the dough in on itself a few times until it forms a ball (don’t overwork). Place the dough back in the mixing bowl and cover, set a timer for 20 minutes, then repeat twice for a total of three turns and two rests.
Place dough back in the mixing bowl to rest for about 2 hours. (This is called bulk rest.) Divide the dough into two 2-pound pieces and shape into a boule (ball-like shape).
Place in a lightly dusted bread proofing basket (banneton) and proof (let the dough rise) for about 12 hours. It may take several attempts to find the best place for sourdough to proof.
If using a thick baking stone, set oven temperature to 450 degrees. With a thinner baking stone, set to 500 degrees. (Home ovens are all slightly different, so finding just the right temp may take a few tries.)
Preheat a cast iron pan on a lower rack in the oven until it’s hot. Just before loading the dough into the oven, toss 3 or 4 ice cubes in the pan to create steam. This will prevent the dough from forming a crust immediately, and allow it to expand while baking.
Lightly dust a wooden bread or pizza peel and turn the sourdough boule out of its basket onto the peel. With a razor blade, slash the top of the boule several times and slip onto the baking stone.
A 2-pound loaf will take about 45 minutes to bake. When it reaches the color you like, remove with the flour-dusted peel and cool before slicing.
