Very Good Bread | Melissa Weller

Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book. Around here we're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and homecook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show. So Melissa, take me back to 25 plus years ago and you crack open the Crust and Crumb cookbook by Peter Reinhart.

Melissa Weller: At the time, 25 years ago, it had the most information about bread making. It wasn't just a recipe back then. You couldn't find much information about the hows and whys of bread making. There would just be a recipe and you would follow it and it had explanations and I really liked that. So that book was really helpful for me and I used it to make a loaf of bread that was just phenomenal.

Suzy Chase: So moving on to France, you've described your time in France as life-changing. What was it about those early experiences with French bread that made you fall so deeply in love with baking? And was this what made you fall in love with baking?

Melissa Weller: I think I fell in love with baking because I was baking with my mom growing up, something that I loved to do. I had never been on a plane until I was in my sophomore year of college. So I went to France when I was a junior, so I hadn't really done a lot of traveling except local traveling by car. So this was the first time I had been in Europe and it was changing for me to see something that I really wanted to be there when I was growing up and couldn't afford it. And I finally get there and the food blew me away. Everything, the bakeries, the brioche, the baguettes, you name it. And I just was drawn to baguettes. Maybe we all were. It was something that as a student you could afford to buy and make a meal out of. Right.

And I just became curious about how is it made, and I did the same thing for brioche. How is brioche made? I wanted to make them at home. You couldn't find anything. You couldn't even find cheeses. This was in the early nineties. You couldn't find goats cheese in the grocery store, so you forget how things change over time. I was just making some pretty crazy sugar cookies yesterday with some sumac and I'm like, sumac is a pretty normal spice these days, at least I think it is. But go back to the early nineties, spices, cheese, all different. You couldn't get that stuff and you couldn't get good bread. Nowhere in Pennsylvania could you really find really good bread. And so I wanted to know how to make it. I was pretty set on figuring that out when I came back from my trip.

Suzy Chase: I'm a little obsessed with your time at Bread Alone and reading about that time in your life sounds really intense.

Melissa Weller: That was my first bread baking job and I was in over my head for sure. It was too much physical work. I couldn't lift the bags of flour. There was one bag of flour, it was like 40 kilos. I kid you not, it was over a hundred pounds and I couldn't do it by myself and I couldn't get the volume out quickly enough. It was really challenging and I think I was just trying to figure out little tricks that I could do to save time because I knew that the longest part of the time was just physically lifting it, lifting those bags of flour over to the mixer. There was two big mixers. Each one held like 200 pounds of dough, and so you had a water meter, and so the water would be measured into the bowl, but then you had to carry the bags.

Usually it was like three bags of flour per mix to carry those 50 pound bags of flour, boop, boop, boop, and get them into, then you'd use this big serrated bread knife to rip open the bag of flour and pour it into the bowl. I couldn't physically do it for a while, and I did. I got stronger over the summer and I was then just trying to figure out all these little tricks that would make me faster as a baker. It was just all men. It was like all men and me and I was pretty determined to make it work.

Suzy Chase: So let's move on to Per Se, why is the scoring so critical in bread? And talk a little bit about the baguette at Per Se.

Melissa Weller: If you don't score bread, let's start there. You put it into the oven and there's no steam, it will start to expand and the outside will dry out and it will form a crust. There's no moisture in the oven, there's no scoring, and the bread's still expanding in the center of the loaf, and it will then decide where it's going to burst open. And so you'll get these Frankenstein like bursting opens, and so you need steam in the oven so the outside of the bread doesn't seal up before the inside's done expanding. So it really truly expands to its full potential. That's something sort of funny. And then you get to decide, you don't let the bread decide, the loaf decide for you. You decide where is it going to open up. And so by scoring the bread, you're deciding, hey, you open up your bread loaf and then you can make them as fancy and decorative as you want, or you can make them as practical and functional as you want.

I tend to be a pretty practical functional like bread score, so you won't see all these beautiful decorations from me, but I also, I might be segueing too far into bread scoring here, but you let your low proof and so proofing is when it rises again. And so you don't really know as a beginner, you don't know, did I proof it enough? I can poke it, does it spring back? I don't really know what's happening. So you just sort of take a guess when you're first doing it, you take a guess. I think it's proofed enough and you put it in and you score it, but maybe it needed to proof longer. Well, you'll find out because your score won't be deep enough and it will just have so much energy. It'll just, again, Frankenstein burst open. So then if you have a loaf that you proof too much and you make a big score in it, maybe you don't want to do that either because if you've made a big score in your loaf of bread and it doesn't have much energy left, given all of its energy up to proofing, it's going to sort of not really open up into the score.

It's not really going to do too much. It's going to be like, I already gave all my energy. I don't have anything left.

Suzy Chase: Why is the poolish baguette considered the classic one, which was at Per Se, right?

Melissa Weller: It was poolish is sort of the easiest thing to get your head around because you're just mixing water and flour in a little bit of yeast and it ferments. So anytime you ferment something way ahead of time, it boosts the flavor of whatever it is that you're making. So it would boost the flavor of the baguette. And so the idea is that it's boosting the flavor of the baguette instead of just doing flour and water and salt and yeast, you're giving it a little bit of a flavor boost. And polish also gets really stretchy. And so you've got these really long baguettes and you need something to help you stretch them out. And so the polish helps with that too. But Aish baguette is a more practical baguette, if that makes sense. Sourdough starter baguette, that's like a luxury baguette and a baguette is, it's like a working horse type of baguette in my head.

Suzy Chase: Do you find that the foolish is more flavorful?

Melissa Weller: I do. I do. Maybe not as much as sourdough starter, which is why I like to have a sourdough starter baguette, but I do feel that it adds to the fermentation and the quality of the baguette.

Suzy Chase: So you have a six day sourdough process and in the book you talk about writing out a baking schedule and say it's good for setting us up for success. How come,

Melissa Weller: Okay, if you have a job, we most all do. You have to make your bread around your regular job. And for me, it reminds me of when I was at Babo and I needed to write it out because these things take time. I'm like, how am I going to make this bread that takes two full days? When am I going to squeeze it into my regular day or maybe weekend because we are busy on our weekends too. And so writing out a schedule just helps you sort of like bread making doesn't take a lot of time when you're working with the dough. Bread takes a lot of time when you leave the dough alone and let it do its own fermenting thing. And so understanding that writing out a schedule sort of helps you make a plan so that you're not like, oh, I was supposed to let it rest for two hours and I've got to go pick up my dry cleaning and I'm not going to be back in time. Or for example, it just hopefully helps you succeed.

Suzy Chase: So with our sourdough starter, how do we properly mix and store it On the first day I read that the first day is crucial.

Melissa Weller: I remember when I was first getting going, I was trying a lot of things and trying to get something started at the beginning that was kind of hard. And so anything that's more organic, I think grapes were pretty popular to put into sourdough starters for a while. Yes, I've never heard that. I don't want to say it was a trend, but I remember reading books in the nineties and early two thousands and the way you started your sourdough starter, which you submerged organic grapes, you wrapped them in cheesecloth and you'd submerged them in your slurry of flour and water and the yeasts on the skins of the grapes would start to feed off of the flour. And that was the thing. In fact, my starter was a gift from somebody who had started a sourdough starter in college and he named it concord. So because he had used concord grapes, and so you don't need to use grapes, but you do need to use something where there's going to be more like natural living yeasts still there, let's say. And so I think I called for rye flour, like organic rye flour because it tends to have more yeasts available to feed on the flour.

Suzy Chase: Okay, how do we know when it's time to feed it for the very first time?

Melissa Weller: I think you follow the recipe, it's pretty much you don't need to, it's do this and then 24 hours do this and then 24 hours later do this. It's all about building up a concentration of yeast.

Suzy Chase: Is that why you discard a portion of the starter at first to get the concentration going?

Melissa Weller: Exactly. That's why you're doing it. Exactly. It's about building up the concentration of yeasts in your starter because you won't really have a big concentration of yeast when you first start. When I was first started doing baking at home, before I was working professionally, I remember doing it and I made my first loaf of bread. It was really good. But then at the same time, I bought a sourdough starter online and I resuscitated that and my loaf was bigger because the yeast was more concentrated and stronger. And so when you're first getting started, there are a bunch of different ways to go. But if I was doing it again, honestly, I'd probably go to my local bakery and ask them for some sourdough starter to get going, or I've definitely ordered sourdough from King Arthur flour. It comes in a little jar. I think bakers are good about sharing their starter, so making your own starter, it shouldn't be so intimidating. And if you follow the recipe, you should get a good strong starter. If you don't want to go through the six day process and you want to make bread now, I'm sure that a local bakery would be happy to give you some of their starter.

Suzy Chase: Okay, so we've made our sourdough loaf. What is your preferred knife to cut through a crusty loaf?

Melissa Weller: A serrated bread knife,

Suzy Chase: Any serrated bread knife?

Melissa Weller: This is a trick question, right?

Suzy Chase: Well, I just didn't know if you have one that you love, one that works the best.

Melissa Weller: A sharp one. A sharp one. I know that sounds silly to say, and I don't even know what I wrote in my book because generally I like an offset serrated bread knife. I feel like I get a better angle, but that's my personal preference. I've used so many different bread knives wherever I visit, and I think it's pretty dangerous. If your bread knife isn't sharp enough, you could hurt yourself. It's always important to have a sharp knife and to be mindful about where your fingertips are when you're slicing bread.

Suzy Chase: So now for my segment called The Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe your perfect bite of your favorite bread in this cookbook,

Melissa Weller: I like the City White Bread. That would be my perfect bite because you've got a really dark burnished crust and then you've got this really soft interior that is not, it's chewy but soft and it just sort of melt perfectly, sort of melts in your mouth.

Suzy Chase: Do you put anything on it like butter?

Melissa Weller: Definitely. How do I think for me, salted butter buerre de baratte, any kind of salted butter you can get your hands on, that's tasty to you. Sometimes when I can't get salted butter, I use really good butter and I sprinkle some salt on it and sometimes that's how I like it. And then if I keep eating more bread, I pull out the jam or pull out the cheese.

Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Melissa Weller: My Instagram handle is Melissa Funk Weller and my website is melissa makes bread.com.

Suzy Chase: You said to your editor, bagels are bread and all my bread recipes should be in one place. And thank goodness your editor believed in this book. It's really special. Thanks so much, Melissa for coming on Dinner Party Podcast.

Melissa Weller: Thank you so much for having me.

Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party Podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzychase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.