Taking Up the Slack

The first dough to go down was the sour rye. In a moment it became a stringy, runny mass and had to be discarded; "slack" is what the bakers of a generation ago called this phenomenon. Most modern bakers refer to any dough with high hydration, ciabatta for example, as being slack, but that was not the case with that batch of rye.

With nothing to go on, I called another baker for enlightenment and yes, I'd fermented it overnight at room temperature as per the instructions. She had no idea why it was acting so strangely then and quickly got off the phone.Working twenty hours a day seven days a week at the shop gave me little time to ponder the situation, and I simply began the next job on my list.

When I was a kid, my mom sometimes made "cheese delights". A piece of bread, a slab of cheese, a sliced tomato, all broiled to screeching perfection. The tomato became so hot it seared the roof of your mouth, and the flavors of the tomato juices and hot cheddar melded together memorably, especially with her homemade bread. Anyway, I was after that taste with the next disaster, a sun-dried tomato and cheddar sourdough. This one started going south the instant the tomatoes got into the mix. Feverishly shoveling gluten into the bowl in an effort to stave off catastrophe, the problem worsened; I baked the sloppy mess just to see what would happen. It smelled like deliciously toasted cheese and tomato but had the bite of an engine mount.

This experience held an important clue, though. Flour is essentially two things: protein in the form of gluten, and starch. While the protein remained sound, something was breaking down the starch phase, wasn't it? I tried the bread again, tossing the tomatoes in starch-rich cake flour first, and the result was my original, cheesy goal.

Malt is an ingredient, malting a process. And this became a key to understanding why the doughs slackened. "Malt", the ingredient, is made from malted barley. It comes in two forms: flour and syrup, and syrup is available as two basic types, diastatic and non-diastatic. Malt syrup is made non-diastatic through heat treating.

The word Diastatic emblazoned on the bucket of malt syrup made me so curious I had to look it up in the unabridged dictionary. It means to turn starch into diastase, or grape sugar. I began researching how this occurred. E-mailing the malt manufacturer, their lab got right back to me and explained that diastatic malt has enzymes that break starch down into simpler sugars. Further investigation into scientific books and baking websites pieced together the explanation to my problem.

Barley is a seed. A grass seed. As it sprouts, or malts, enzymes break it's inherent starch molecules into shorter sugar chains, releasing nutrition for use by the embryonic plant until the establishment of a root system. The enzymes in malted barley break down the starch in wheat flour, essentially ground up grass seed, as well. Wheat flour has enzymes of it's own that do the same thing, but the addition of malt hastens the process of sugar development tremendously. And why bother? Because yeast metabolizes only one very specific type of sugar during fermentation, and the smaller the sugars it has to work with initially the faster and better it will ferment a dough.

Not surprisingly, a batch of Italian dough went slack when I accidentally put too much malt syrup in it. But what of the other breads? There was no malt added to them, but they still fell apart.

There are many formulas for Normandy apple bread, and the best one called for half cider and half water. Well forget that, I thought, it's all cider or nothing.
Apparently cider has a lot of enzymes, and by now, dear reader, you know what that meant.
Thinking back, I saw my son Kevin as a little squirt standing on top of his great gran daddy's cider mill, throwing all the apples he could into the hopper. Whole apples. Whole apples with seeds. Seeds with...
Reasoning that if enzymes in malt syrup are denatured by heat, the enzymes in apple cider should be as well. The cider was boiled, reduced in half, actually, in order to concentrate the flavor, and a crumb of yeast added to ferment it for several days. The bread was superb.

Oh, yes, one other thing. Except for the Italian, the common thread in all of the above breads was a sour starter of wild yeasts and acid-producing cultures. A regular little enzyme factory, as it turns out. Starter too ripe made some doughs slack and some loaves, sourdough for one, flay open during proof. A couple of things control enzyme activity. Salt slows down the canalization of starches, but it kills yeast cells as well, making it unsuitable for the job. Enzymes, as do many things in nature, react to time and temperature. Beside the aforementioned denaturing by heat, lower temperatures slow the action of enzymes. Controlling dough temperature through standard calculations became common procedure at the shop; refrigerating the rye sponge overnight cured it's problems.