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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Mastering an 'ancient' bread

• Make an oven like the pros use
• Despite prep time, fresh French bread isn't hard to make

By Linda Beaulieu
Associated Press

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Master bread-baker Peter Reinhart learned about "Pain a l'Ancienne" at Philippe Gosselin's Boulangerie in 1996, when he went to Paris to study with some of France's very best bakers.

Simply translated, Pain a l'Ancienne means ancient bread. Simply described, it's the best bread Reinhart has ever tasted.

The odd thing about Pain a l'Ancienne is that it isn't the least bit ancient.

"It really should be called 'Pain Moderne,' " says Reinhart, who is still trying to find out where this revolutionary bread originated and how it got its name.

"The Pain a l'Ancienne I had in Paris was the best baguette I'd ever had," recalls Reinhart, an award-winning baker and cookbook author who has sampled countless loaves in his life. He has been a leader in America's artisan bread movement for more than 15 years.

How to make this peerless French bread is the heart and soul of Reinhart's latest book, "The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread" (Ten Speed Press, $35), which contains more than 50 master formulas for classic breads as varied as anadama bread, bagels, challah, corn bread, sourdough and Swedish rye. Just recently, the book received top awards from the International Association of Cooking Professionals and the James Beard Foundation.

The secret to making this bread is not in the ingredients or in the hearth oven in which it is baked. It's in the recipe's delayed fermentation technique, caused by using ice-cold water to mix it and then immediately refrigerating it.

In Gosselin's technique, the yeast is not added until the second day, Reinhart explains. In Reinhart's version, modified for home bakers, the yeast is added during the first mix.

"This brings about the same result as Gosselin's method," Reinhart says. Gosselin can't use this approach, he adds, because his batches are so large that the yeast won't cool down quickly enough to delay fermentation.

"This bread could never have been made in ancient times or any time prior to the advent of refrigeration," Reinhart explains. "I think it has been given the name Pain a l'Ancienne because of how it looks."

The bread is quite rustic in appearance, with a deep golden-brown color, a crackly crust and a gossamer-like doughy interior.

Reinhart wonders if the bread is one of those lucky accidents in cooking, where a new dish is born simply by chance. Perhaps some baker along the way didn't have time to bake all his bread and refrigerated the dough overnight.

The bread he baked the next day was quite different, Reinhart theorizes, and a new kind of bread was thus introduced to the world.

This process of holding the dough overnight, then slowly "awakening" it to continue fermenting at room temperature, results in a quite different range of flavors and textures than is found in the standard baguette.

The final product has a natural sweetness and nutlike character that is distinct from other breads made with exactly the same ingredients but fermented by the standard method. The lean, rustic dough can be used in many ways, from baguettes to pizza and focaccia.

Reinhart says cold-dough fermentation has the potential to change the entire bread landscape in America. He has taught this method to his students at Johnson & Wales University's College of Culinary Arts in Providence, at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and across the country in classes for home bakers.

"Within the next few years, I fully expect to see variations of this method appearing in both artisan bakeshops and at the industry level," Reinhart says.

"It is the next frontier in breads and has tremendous implications for both professional and home bakers."

In his chapter on Pain a l'Ancienne, Reinhart offers this technical explanation: "The cold mixing and fermentation cycles delay the activation of the yeast until after the amylase enzymes have begun their work of breaking down starch into sugar. When the dough is brought to room temperature and yeast wakes up and begins feasting, it feeds on sugars that weren't there the day before. A reserve of sugar remains in the fermented dough to flavor it and caramelize the crust during the baking cycle."