Coleman and Carver and Pizza

Mose Coleman grew onions. In 1931 Georgia, onion farmers were not paying their bills, but, Mose Coleman grew onions. At harvest, as I think all people who work with food will do, Mose cut one of the flat, yellow bulbs and tasted. This onion was sweet!

Part of the American dream is to prove to the world you can make lemonade when life deals you a lemon. But for Mose Coleman, he had to prove to the world you could do something with a sweet onion. Finishing the harvest, he began to sell his onions to the roadside passers-by. "Vidalia Sweet Onions", the onion that was not hot, the onion that was good in a cool summer salad, the onion that would perfectly match a fresh grilled hamburger... Mose Coleman ended the season selling Vidalia Sweet Onions for $3.50 a fifty pound bag, a remarkable price, and an industry was born.

Mr. Mose Coleman was white.

A few years before, George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute, pondered how to remedy vitamin deficiencies in rural Alabama. He wrote "every normal person should make the tomato a very prominent part of the weekly diet". Inspired by his friend and co-worker Adella Hunt Logan, he published a circular on 115 ways to prepare the tomato for the table.

Mr. Carver was black.

Mose Coleman and Mr. Carver possibly never met. However, the onion Mr. Coleman cut on that summer day in 1931 and the tomato that Mrs. Logan convinced Mr. Carver was a solution to malnutrition had crossed several times in the prior 400 years...

The Crossings

Scientists do not know the exact origin of the tomato. However, if we believe Vavilov's theories, the region with the widest genetic diversity of a species will most likely be the area of its origin. If this is the case, tomatoes come originally from Peru, where numerous variants to Lycopersicon peruvianum are found growing as berry bushes. These berry bushes were carried north by natives so that by the time of the arrival of the Conquistadores in 1509, the Aztecs were making a mix of tomatoes and chiles as the first 'salsa'.

Cortez's scholars (for Cortez was only interested in gold) took the tomato back to Spain where it diffused through Europe, missing England. In Spain, the fruit was called pome del Moro, the Moor's apple (you could tell what was on their mind). The French, not understanding Spanish very well, corrupted this to pomme d'amour, the love apple (you could tell what was on their mind). The Italians shortened this further to pomodoro (mangia! mangia!), and published the first recipe using tomatoes in 1698. For some reasons, the English could not pronounce either the Spanish or French name and considered the tomato "rank and stinking", and so continued centuries of culinary excellence.



The onion that had been cut open in that Vidalia field in 1931, sighed, and recalled its beginnings as a transplant that came from Texas. If it could have remembered further, its ancestors came from Bermuda, an island whose human inhabitants were skilled at building fast schooners from native cedars. Fast schooners were good for trade, and the US Civil War made Bermuda a haven for smugglers and their providers who valued the anonymity of the island as well as the speed of their boats.

However, in the 1870's, smuggling had collapsed with the Southern states and Bermuda was in an economic crisis. A bright soul noted the islands temperate climate and a surplus of fast boats suggested Bermuda become New York's garden. Seven hundred sea miles separated the two, but this was only three days sail for the fast island schooners. A new industry was again born. Hamilton, the capital, was known as 'Onion Town' until another bright soul in Texas noted that they could also grow 'Bermuda' onions there.

The reason 'Bermuda' onions could be grown in Texas is that their seeds came from the Canary Islands, the world's source for onion seeds until 1949, since the Romans and Spanish brought the onion from Europe in 100 B.C.

Texas became the new onion capital of the western hemisphere by 1900. Its universities began to cross breed onions. One particular experiment crossed the 'Excel' onion from Valencia, Spain, with the 'Grano' Texas-Bermuda-Canary Islands onion to form the 'Granex'. Texans exported large quantities of Granex transplants (seeds were uncommon before the use of herbicides--weed seeds grew faster than onion seeds), one of which, when planted in the low-sulfur soil of Vidalia, Georgia, grew to be very sweet and unfortunately, would end its existence cut open by Mr. Mose Coleman.

Pre Treatment

We will prepare a standard 100:60 (60% AR) bread with the difference of using re-hydrated #1 bulgur to give the dough nutty wheat bits. The large size of the bulgur compared to wheat bran should protect the glutens and give an good rise and crumb.

• 150 gm King Arthur Whole Wheat
• 450 gm King Arthur All Purpose Flour
• 360 gm water at room temperature

Mixed at second speed 7 minutes to form a thick dough

• Bulgur #1 120gm rehydrated with 240 gm water

Both dough and re hydrated bulgur were maintained warm at 40C for 12 hours













Rehydrated #1 bulgur wheat




Mixing

Prepare a mixture of

• 1800 gm water at 40C
  
• 7 gm yeast La Vahiné
• 30 gm melao

• 72 gm salt (=3600 gm total flour @ 2%)
  

This is allowed to mix for 5 minutes, then blended with the bulgur and pre-treated flour using the paddle attachment for 20 minutes. At 5 minutes before the end of mixing, add the 72 gm of salt. The entire mixture should be foaming. Then:

• Add 3kg of KA Bread flour

and mix using a dough hook for 7 minutes or as needed to meet the farinograph specification of the flour, typically 7-9 minutes.

Forming

La Vahiné is very slow yeast and it is used at about 0.2% concentration, well below the 'quick' recipes that use 1%. Therefore, this dough will need to rise and be knocked down repeatedly. Fortunately, all the risings add flavor and stretch gluten.

This batch rose (at 27C) 2.5 hours (real estate agent was here), 1 hour, and 1 hour before forming.

Formed into

• 40 100 gm rounds= 4 kg +
  
• of which 8 were formed as Parkerhouse rolls with a drop of tomato and onion paste in the center
  
• 5 250 gm mini-loaves = 1.25 kg
• 3 200 gm pizza rounds = 0.6 kg
  

The rounds were allowed to rise 40 minutes before being formed into French pistolet rolls and immediately baked.

The mini loaves rose for 40 minutes before docking and baking.

The pizza rounds were allowed to rise approximately 1 hour

Parkerhouse rolls looking at you

Baking

Rolls were baked at 230C for 12 minutes
Mini loaves were baked at 230C for 18 minutes (and could have used less)
Pizzas were baked at 230C for 9 minutes. (Unused rounds were baked for 4 minutes, then frozen for later use.)








Very good bloom and grigne on the stones








Thin sliced topping

Structure on a pizza is more interesting. Marinated tomatoes and onions will be moist and spicy and will resist the heat of baking, concentrating their flavors.

Use:

• Two vine-ripened tomatoes (they should smell like the tiny hairs of the tomato leaf)
• One half a larger Vidalia onion
• Salt
• Dried basil
  
• Balsamic vinegar

Thinly slice the tomatoes and onions latitudinally. In a small bowl, layer tomatoes, salt sprinkled on the layer to taste, basil, then a layer of onion. Repeat until the bowl is nearly full, then add 15-30 ml of balsamic vinegar.

Allowing this mixture to stand for 2-3 hours will let the salt draw the water from the tomatoes and mix with the spices and balsamic vinegar.












Results

Parkerhouse rolls with a touch of tomato and onion paste baked inside

Mini loaves and raw pizza

Secale Cerale (D=7)

From the Finnish Rye Institute

Rye is alone. Rye is used to the cold steppes of northeastern Europe. It can be abused. The tiny kernel germinates, and in doing so, knows it will have a difficult life. Four root branches reach out for water; wheat (Triticum aestivum), the summer grain, has three. Dry, it survives. Cold, it survives. Rye sown on cold, over-cultivated soil can be 'eternal', giving a crop every year.

Rye is old, untouched. It is a diploid (2n) grain. Weeds are diploids. Weeds that crossed with emmer made wheat. Rye can remake itself with only 14 chromosomes. Wheat takes 42. Left alone, it returns to being weedy and invasive.

Rye does not waste. Its seed makes starch, and starch only for the next generation. There is no gluten and few other proteins that wait for milling and mixing to be turned into bread. Pliny the Elder, raised on the baking art of Roman Spain, scorned it, called it a poor food, "serving only to avert starvation."

Rye is Shiva. Its destruction is its creation. Within it, rye alpha-amylase is heat resistant, a strange thing for a plant used to cold winters. Left wet, rye begins to decompose its starches into sugars. With yeast, these form alcohol, and gave northern man beer, and when northern man met Arab science (al kohl), rye whiskey. With no yeast, the sugars met lactobacilli, which soured the rye, and conveniently, stopped the action of the amylase. No amylase, and the starches remained intact. Intact starches meant a loaf could be formed and baked. Northern man put down his beer and considered the problem...

Base recipe and approach

Rye amylases are more temperature stable and act upon the rye flour's starch structure, limiting dough strength. Amylase activity is inhibited at low pH, requiring the use of citric acid in the dough or by souring the dough in an anaerobic environment. (see p. 24 of Handbook of Dough Fermentation, CRC press/Google Books). The amylase activity and starch content of rye flour recommend a two step process:

1. Add water and large quantities of yeast and let the 'porridge' mixture ferment between 20-30C for 24 hours. Lactic acid decomposition will make the mixture acid. Baker's yeast will keep activity in a lower pH medium. The intent is to have an acid yeast mixture for mixing into step 2. The classic term for this is the poolish.
   
2. Mix the poolish into the remaining flour, adding some bread flour in this case for structure.

The mix below shows a very 'soupy' Poolish that becomes a 100:60 dough as the final ingredients are incorporated. All units are in baker's measures, with 100 begin equal to the total rye flour weight.

Ingredient	Poolish	Mixing	Total	As % of total flour
Rye Flour	55	45	100	100
Bread Flour	0	43	43
Water	53	33	86	60
Dry Yeast	3	1	4	3
Salt	0	3	3	2

Pre Treatment

The first water, yeast, and rye flour poolish was mixed at noon before the baking day. Some minor changes to the poolish were:

• Adding a bit of regular bread flour (30gm) to take advantage of the barley malt. [This was due to a misunderstanding of rye flour chemistry. If anything, rye flour needs an amylase inhibitor rather than additional amylase.]
• The yeast was proofed in 40C water with 10 gm of melao.

The poolish was allowed to ferment at 27-30 C for 20 hours.

First mixing of poolish

Ingredient	Poolish	Mixing	Total
Rye Flour	480 gm	395 gm	875 gm
Bread Flour	0 gm	375 gm	375 gm
Water	465 gm	285 gm	750 gm
Dry Yeast	24 gm	12 gm	36 gm
Salt		25 gm	25 gm

After 2o hours at 27-30C, a foamy mass with a tart, pungent smell

Mixing

185 grams of a total 285 gm of water was heated to 40C, mixed with 10 gm of melao and yeast, then left 10 minutes to proof. After showing good activity, the liquid was added to the poolish with an additional 100 gm of pickle sour (a culture of 3% NaCl w/v with lactobacilli cultures taken from pickling vats). The intent of the sour was to add flavor. Unknowingly, the additional acid helped maintain the rye starch structure by inhibiting alpha-amylase activity.

Lactobcillus culture in salt from pickle vats

Mixing with a dough hook proved interesting as there are no gliadins or 'sticky' proteins to make the planetary dough hook on a Hobart K5SS 5-quart mixer 'grab' the dough. After five minutes of futile slapping of the dough hook, the dough was kneaded by hand for six minutes. Without glutens, the kneading made a homogeneous dough, but a dough without much strength.

Rising

With nearly 3% yeast the dough rises immediately. The dough more than doubled in volume in a sealed mixing bowl when proofed at 40C. The lack of gluten is obvious by the cracking of the dough ball:

There is no knockdown. Knockdown is useful in wheat doughs to 'stretch' the glutens and create further strength.

Forming and second rising

Dough was divided into 100gm boules and formed into balls. The balls were placed on oiled sheet pans and allowed to rise approximately one hour. As shown in the pictures below the boules expand nicely with a second rising of one hour at 27C.



Baking

The risen boules were delicate. You had to handle these carefully to avoid creating finger marks on the dough (that would not have been pushed out by baking). The rolls were placed lightly onto a peel dusted with rye flour and slid onto the baking hearth.

Rye breads are baked at a lower temperature and for longer periods than wheat doughs. The rolls were divided into four groups to test docking and steam injection. All bread was baked at 200C convection, with baking stones soaked for at least one hour at temperature. Baking time was 16 minutes.

Steam groups

• Group 1 -- Baked on stone in boules
• Group 2 -- Baked on stone with one slash (to test 'push')

Dry groups

• Group 3 -- Baked on stone in boules
• Group 4 -- Baked on stone with one slash

Results

There was little 'push'. The rolls elevated slightly from the baking stone or weakly broke open at the slash. The steam baked rolls had a darker crust, as expected, with a slightly more caramel aroma after baking. Weight loss in baking was about 5-7% for the steam injected baking and 10% for the dry baked rolls. The crumb was small and tight.

Steam injected (l) and dry baked (r)

Click on the picture for a close up

Next steps

• Do not use bread flour in the poolish. This adds unneeded amylase. The rye flour has more than sufficient sugars to attract lactobacilli.
  
• Think of adding the lactobacilli earlier in the poolish stage to start an culture to co-exist with the yeast.
• Do not stress mixing. This bread has weak glutens. Stress keeping the starch structure intact and handling the dough delicately.