Flour, Salt, Water, and Time

Fridays at Country Roads’ office are special. First thing in the morning, if you step into the kitchen for coffee, you’ll likely need to reach for the sugar around one or more large bowls draped with tea towels. When you get to your desk you might find that your cup (and your clothing, if you happen to be wearing black) has collected a light dusting of flour. At various times during the day you might hear sounds of culinary endeavor from downstairs (clattering, things falling to the floor, muffled swearing). Then, somewhere around 2 pm, your consciousness will be elevated by the most magnificent aroma drifting up the stairs. Heads up, everyone; Lucie’s baking bread again. 

[Read this: Talking pop-ups, pies, and photogenic breadcrumbs with Christina Balzebre of Levee Baking Company.]

Friends, this is just one benefit of passing your days in an office with (a) a passionate cook and (b) a pretty good kitchen. If you follow food trends at all you might have noticed that baking one’s own sourdough bread—that is, bread leavened with naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeasts rather than commercially produced baker’s yeast—is all the rage. There’re so many books, blogs, and websites devoted to the subject that you’ll be forgiven for thinking that there’s something new about it. But people have been making bread this way for, literally, thousands of years. In fact until about 150 years ago, when commercially produced baker’s yeast arrived on the scene, incorporating into your bread dough a small portion of leftover, slightly fermented dough from a previous day’s baking was the only way to create that miraculous foodstuff—crusty on the outside, airy and chewy with just a touch of sourness within—that has served as the staff of life for most of western civilization for five thousand years. Sadly though, somewhere along the way, our appetite for speed and convenience won out; we started buying sweetened, spongy, highly preserved stuff to spread our peanut butter on and forgot that when a carefully cultivated population of lactobacilli are introduced to flour, salt, and water (that’s it, really) and left to their own devices for a while, a quiet culinary miracle occurs. All it takes is time. 

Lucie knows this and, having joined the small but enlightened club of fanatics lovingly nurturing pots of fermenting sourdough starter in the back of their fridges, she’s now primed to throw together a loaf at the drop of a hat. Because you see, although a good, flavorsome sourdough takes time to develop, it doesn’t demand much of the actual baker. Lucie has discovered that if she throws her dough together in the morning (nothing but flour, salt, and water, remember), then the standard eight-hour workday provides the ideal timeline for baking beautiful bread. Every half hour that morning, she takes a two-minute desk break to give her creation a quick turn, re-shaping the dough through a series of slow rises that give the population of industrious lactobacilli within the time they need to feed on sugars in the flour, developing that magical combination of lactic acid and carbon dioxide that lofts her loaf to pillowy perfection. Mid-afternoon she slips it into the oven and forty minutes later the results—crusty on the outside, chewy and full-flavored within—are good for body, soul, and for elevating the high regard in which Lucie is already held by her workmates. It beats a brownie break anytime. 

[You'll like: Donald Link on the backlash of taking over La Boulangerie.]

Until Lucie started performing this little piece of culinary magic, if you wanted a loaf of proper sourdough bread anywhere in Louisiana outside of New Orleans, your only option was to bake it yourself, hunt down a cottage baker like Rosch Bakehaus, or drive to New Orleans, where several bakeries including Breads on Oak, La Boulangerie, Levee Baking Co., and Bellegarde Bakery are doing a roaring trade in the stuff, if the faithful lining up for a loaf in the mornings are any indication. But at last, word seems to be spreading. For all the flavor-starved Baton Rougeans not fortunate enough to share a workplace with an obsessive baker, I’m pleased to report that as of June, the superb Bellegarde Bakery is making daily deliveries of beautiful, freshly made loaves to Rouses Village Market (off Airline Highway) with plans to expand to other Rouses locations, Whole Foods, and local restaurants. And if all the above inspires you to become your own office’s sourdough maven, Bellegarde offers bread-making classes, too. One taste is all it takes. Visit bellegardebakery.com. 

* Publisher's note: Shortly after this article appeared, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kathleen Cooper, the owner of Plaquemine's Forte Grove Bakery, to whom I am indebted for reminding me that Forte Grove offers superb artisanal sourdough breads at both of Baton Rouge's Red Stick Farmer's Markets. And have been doing so for close to nine years. So I stand corrected; real, artisanal sourdough is available in Baton Rouge. Taste what you've been missing by visiting Forte Grove on Thursday mornings at Pennington, or Saturday mornings at Fifth and Main streets, downtown. 

—James Fox-Smith, publisher