Science Friday - Bread Baking Science And Denial In Climate Report. Oct 4, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Flour, salt, yeast and water are the basic ingredients in bread that can be transformed into a crusty baguette or a pillowy naan. But what happens when you get a sticky sourdough or brick-like brioche? Chef Francisco Migoya of Modernist Cuisine breaks down the science behind the perfect loaf. He talks about how gluten-free flours affect bread structure, the effects of altitude and humidity on dough and how to keep your sourdough starter happy. Plus, amateur baker and “Father of the Xbox” Seamus Blackley describes how he baked a loaf of bread from an ancient Egyptian yeast. The Bureau of Land Management issued an environmental impact statement last month that examines the effects that oil development will have on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Buried deep in the appendix of the report was this BLM response to a public comment: "The BLM does not agree that the proposed development is inconsistent with maintaining a livable planet (i.e., there is not a climate crisis). The planet was much warmer within the past 1,000 years, prior to the Little Ice Age, based on extensive archaeological evidence (such as farming in Greenland and vineyards in England). This warmth did not make the planet unlivable; rather, it was a time when societies prospered." The comment alludes to the so-called “Medieval Warm Period,” which is commonly referenced by climate change deniers to justify their beliefs. The BLM has since said the comment had no bearing on the scientific conclusions contained elsewhere in the report. Adam Aton, a climate reporter at E&E News, joins Ira to talk about the report, and what fossil fuel development in the Arctic might mean for local wildlife and the planet. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, it's going to be a bread feast. We're going to talk about the science of bread baking, and we want to help you with your home baking issues. Do you have a question about your sourdough fermentation? You don't know how different flowers will affect your bread structure. What's going on, anyhow, when you bake bread? Give us a call.

Our number 844-724-8255-8-44-724-8-8-4-8-4-4-8-4-4-4-8-4. or you can tweet us at SciFri. That's coming up after we talk about this. The Arctic holds 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and up to 10 billion barrels of that might be in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, meaning that patch of pristine, Alaskan real estate, is in the crosshairs of oil companies and the Trump administration, both of whom want to get that oil out of the ground. Last month, the Bureau of Land Management released an environmental impact statement on what fossil fuel development would mean for the wildlife refuges environment, cultural resources, and of course it's wildlife.

but tucked away deep in the appendix, over 600 pages in, was a classic pearl of climate denialism, an off-repeated, fallacious talking point that a warming planet is actually a good thing for civilization, and the assertion that, quote, there is not a climate crisis. How did that make it into a supposedly science-based analysis? And what would drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, as it's called, What would it mean for Alaska and the planet? Two-thirds of Americans surveyed by the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication. Opposed drilling in Anwar.

But we're polling you, our listeners, what do you think? Pro or Khan, RENWI, our number 844-8255. We can talk about that, and actually maybe about that little factoid tucked away in the appendix. Or you can tweet us at Cy FRI, S-S-I-F-R-I. Let me open the discussion with Adam Aiton, climate reporter at E&E News in Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey there.

Thanks for having me. Well, let's talk about this. Set the scene for us. What is the goal of this report? Well, before the federal government does anything, the law requires them to take this hard look at any kind of consequences that could stem from their actions. And so that's what the administration has done here.

They've looked at what's happening in the Arctic already with climate change and development around the edges. And they're looking at what could happen if they approve a lot expanded drilling in the Arctic. And what they found is that what scientists have been saying for a long time, that the Arctic is warming at a much, much faster rate than other parts of the world. And that's really bringing some massive changes to the wildlife up there and the land itself. And so what the administration has done here is in earlier drafts, they've said, you know, oh, warming can be beneficial. It could lead to more plant growth. It could lead to, you know, longer nesting season for some birds. And some of the government's own scientists earlier in the process caught this,

and they said that that's not true. That's nonsense. And so later on in this process, the government corrected some of that. They said, oh, you're right, actually. warming is going to potentially cause dozens of bird extinctions. It could really reduce or eliminate some of the habitat that's along the coast, the northern coast up there. And what the administration has done here is they've said that those impacts are going to be so great that by comparison allowing some oil drilling in the area really won't make any sort of difference, that the wildlife up there is already facing such dire threats that adding some, oil drilling isn't really going to affect them that much.

So you've talked to the BLM about this. Have you heard back for them about their comments here? Well, specifically about the comments that in the past human societies have flourished from warmer conditions. They said that, you know, those comments don't really affect the meat of what they've done. They say they've put together a many hundred page document that uses the best available science, and that little comment response, they say, doesn't reflect the science that they have put into here. How does a comment like that get in there in the first place? Well, I think it reflects some of the political ideology that some of the top officials in the department have.

You know, there's a kind of heritage of this administration of, you know, starting from the president saying either climate change is a hoax or, you know, presented with increasing evidence that it's happening, saying that actually we shouldn't worry about it or it's too late to worry about it, so we might as well just get ready for it. And scientists tell us that's not really true. I mean, there are, we are not in a place yet where climate change is irreversible or, or doom. to run away. There's still, you know, lots of things that we can do to mitigate emissions, but that's not what's happening here. We're seeing this administration expand fossil fuel development in a really rapid way. And that's kind of the opposite of what scientists say that we need to be doing. And I guess if they get, if drillers get the okay during this administration to do it, that would be a license that would last for years past this administration.

That's right. And that's really what we've seen. at the department level, these sorts of analyses take years and years. They cost millions of dollars and they involve a ton of people. And we've seen this administration really, some would say, rushed the process to try and get this done in the administration's first term in case some other Democrat wins in 2020. And they're trying to hold a lease sale later this year. And that would really lock in some of this development, even if nobody puts a drill bit into the ground under the Trump administration, just having those energy rights will allow them to basically drill in the future if they choose to. So if a Democratic president comes in, there's not

really a clear legal way for them to take back those drilling rights. And what was the Obama administration's stance on drilling in the Arctic? Well, the Obama administration took steps to protect this wildlife refuge. He also took steps to restrict drilling in the ocean waters just north of here. So that's, Anwar is about as north as you can get in the United States. And north of that is, you know, the Arctic Ocean. And the Obama administration withdrew drilling, you know, possibilities from that area. And the Trump administration has tried to undo that, and they haven't succeeded. So some of Obama's policies here have proven durable. But this is one that was put forward by Congress.

And so anything that Obama did has kind of been overturned by that. Is there serious concerns about wildlife extinctions if drilling begins in the refuge? Absolutely, because what we've seen, it is true. The administration does have a point that there are massive changes, you know, occurring in this area. One of the most dramatic is the loss of sea ice. And as that sea ice disappears, the wildlife that depends on it, you know, most famously the polar. bear is going to be forced back onto the land more and more. And along the coastal areas is kind of where the administration says that this oil is.

And so polar bears and other wildlife are essentially being driven into the areas that the administration wants to develop. Let's see if I go to the phones, get a call in before we have to go. Let's go to Rosalie. No, Tara and Rosalie, Nebraska. Sorry about that, Tara. That's okay. Thank you for having me on your show, and I just want to make the comment that I'm absolutely horrified that this administration continues to sell off our planet for future generations in order to line their pockets and the pockets of big oil companies.

They absolutely don't care what happens to generations to come. They just care about making a dollar today. Okay. Thanks for your comment. Let me see if I can get one more phone call from Renee in Cleveland. Hi. Hi. Hi.

Thank you for taking my call today, Ira. My question is one of the biggest comments or arguments I get is, oh, well, scientists changed it from global warming to climate change. So scientists don't even know what they're talking about. They have no way of, you know, it's not actually real. How do you counteract that? How do you start that conversation to say science is a thing. It's changing all the time. And what are some other ways to approach that with people who are climate change desires?

Thank you, Adam. Do you have any suggestions? Yeah, thanks for the question. I mean, the science on this has actually been remarkably consistent. We've known for something like 100 years that carbon emissions trap heat from the sun prevent that heat from leaving the atmosphere. And really what's happened is we've only gotten better and better at forecasting what those changes really mean and how quickly they'll come about. So the science on this is pretty airtight. there are reports from the UN, the IPCC, for those in the know, that have really compiled just hundreds and hundreds of study, really just a mountain of science that say, you know, warming is happening, human emissions are a part of it, but also there's things we can do to slow this process.

And that's really important. We can slow the emissions that we put into the air, and we can do things like planting trees and, you know, promoting ecosystems to take up this carbon and take it out of the atmosphere. Can the House of Representatives do anything to stop this ban, you know, driving? Well, it's funny because on the same day that the administration put out this environmental review, this clearing this big hurdle to drilling, the House of Representatives voted to ban drilling in this area. That, of course, is not going to go anywhere in the Senate because the Senate has, Lisa Murkowski controls a large, you know, she has wide influence in the Senate.

She's the senator from Alaska. And this is something that she has pursued for years and her father before her pursued for years. So this is really critical to Alaskan officials and Republican officials. And so it's hard to see anything short of a Democratic takeover of the entire federal government stopping this. And just quickly, how would this proceed? What should we be keeping an eye out for? Well, the administration wants to get these leases out sold by the end of the year. So there's a couple more steps that they have to take for that.

And one of the processes that's happening kind of parallel to this is we're trying to figure out what's actually underneath the ground here, where is the oil and how much is there. And studies to do that is either on the ground seismic testing or you can do some of that from the air. And so far those tests haven't been able to go forward. So there's a possibility that these lease sales might happen without the public or even some of these companies really having a good idea of what they're buying. Thank you, Adam. Thanks. Adam Aiton is a climate reporter at E&E News in Washington. We're going to take a break and we're going to break bread.

Bake it first, I hope. We're talking about the science behind baking bread, and we want to hear your questions. 844-724-8255. Do you have a bread failure you'd want to talk about? We'll discuss it with the end. experts. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Fall is officially here, and for most people, that means, you know, the leaves are changing, the weather is cooling, time to go out and rake those leaves up. But, you know, to other people,

it's bread baking season. Yes, the basics of bread or flour, salt, water, and yeast, you know that, depending on how you combine those key ingredients. You can get a crusty baguette or a pillowy piece of none, but for you, home bakers, you know, it's not always that simple. I can tell from my own experience. And have you encountered failure to rise that gives you a brick-like loaf or maybe you've made tortillas that come out like mounds of squishy dough? Nothing you want to taco about. Myths about bread baking abound.

How many of them are true? Do you need pure water to bake? Can you use old flour? Is the Dutch oven method? A way to get around a home stove, not quite up to professional standards. Yes, this is our food failures segment. My next guest is here to answer your bread food failures questions with the science behind getting this carb-loaded loaf right.

Let me introduce Francisco Migoia. He's head chef at the modernist cuisine and co-author of the book, Modernist Bread. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Migoia. Doctor. It's great to be here. Thank you. Did I just elevate you? You did.

Chef is fine. Or just Francisco. Okay. Chef Maguire or Francisco. Let's talk about it. Modern cuisine, where you work, it's all about the science of cooking. How much science is there in the perfect loaf of bread? It is, you know, for something that on the surface is so simple that, you know,

something that has four ingredients, flour, water, salt, and yeast. It is possibly one of the most complex systems I've ever. ever come across in my life as a chef. And, you know, frankly, when we first started to write this book, I didn't think we'd have enough material to even fill one volume because of that. I'm like four ingredients. How hard can this be? And, you know, five volumes later, we still had a lot of questions.

We still, we had to cut recipes because we ran out of space. And there was just this world, this can of worms that, or rabbit hole, however you want to put it, is that the world of bread is, there's everything about it is. is incredibly fascinating. And from a scientific perspective, there's just so much to learn about it. Now, I want to get one of the big topics that people talk about it because it does affect so many people and when they talk about bread,

and that is gluten. What is gluten, scientifically speaking, and how do you make bread without gluten? So gluten doesn't exist in flour just to begin with that. And that's something that's important to understand. Gluten is something that occurs when two proteins that are in flour, and those proteins are glutenin and gliding, when they come in contact with water, then gluten begins to form.

And gluten is the, it's a stretchy protein that basically it's what we like about bread. It's what gives bread. It's chew. It's what makes it elastic. And it's also the thing that celiacs have an adverse reaction to. And so when people try to replicate or make gluten-free breads, the Holy Grail is trying to replicate that texture that gluten gives us that pleasant stretch and that chew that we associate with good bread. And that's very hard to do because when you're making gluten-free bread, essentially you're working with flowers that contain zero potential for making gluten. And so how do you get chew out of rice flour, oat flour, you know, all of these different flowers that are used.

often in combination to try to replicate as close as possible that texture that we get from gluten. We have that question, actually, a box pop from Carrie. David from Carrie in North Carolina asked us this question. My wife loves to make chala for the holidays. Unfortunately, both of us are gluten-free, and so the chala is mainly eaten by our guests, and so we would love to be able to have a recipe to make gluten-free chala that really works. Francisco, is that possible? I mean, you have to manage your expectations.

The first thing is, you know, I would love to say you can totally replicate Hala, but Hala in and of itself is a very low moisture dough. So it's in, even with a normal wheat flower-based hala, it's a little bit hard to handle because it's on the, I guess, the stiffer end of the spectrum. And so to try to replicate that one-to-one with gluten-free is we have in our book we have a basically a replacement for flour. It's a mixture of different flour. So you can utilize that one-to-one as a replacement. But you handle it differently. You almost have to

handle it like clay. So in that sense, it almost might be easier to form a braid with gluten-free hala than it is with regular hala. But again, it's that chewing, that softness that we're looking for is it's a little bit harder to achieve. But you can get close to it. What about bread that you don't need? We've heard about no-need recipes. Does kneading activate the gluten? Well, needing accelerates gluten formation. So the no-need technique is pretty brilliant.

I mean, it's basically just combined water and flour. And what happens when you do that, you're hydrating those two proteins. I mentioned, gluten and gliding. It's a chain reaction you can't stop, basically. Now, if you want a fully developed dough, meaning a strong dough, you're going to have to wait if you don't want to mix it, if you don't want to need it, if you don't want to put on a mixer, if all you did was combine these two water and flour and a little bit of yeast and salt, you have to wait a good 18 hours or so for the dough to actually, you know, be strong enough to be manipulated and so that you can bake it and get a nice chewy crusty loaf. Machines and mixing by hand or kneading by hand, what they do is they accelerate that hydration. And so the gluten bonds, those chains develop a lot faster.

So it's a matter of time. intensity versus time is basically the key. You know, for bread, you hear that the secret is in the water, especially here in New York. There's the myth. You've heard this. You can't see me, but I'm rolling my eyes so far back in my head that it hurts. Well, well, okay, let me just tell everybody where I'm headed. You already know where I'm headed that you only get good bagels on New York because of the water.

Let's debunk that myth, if it is one. Well, and the first thing I'm going to tell you is that I used to live in New York City. And I also had terrible bagels in New York City. How do you explain those? I mean, like, they had the water, right? So they had to be great bagels, but I've had terrible bagels in New York City. The first thing we have to understand is that it assumes that every bakery in New York City gets its water from the same exact source. And this is not possible.

It's not true. There's like five different places where New York City gets water from. And all these waters have different mineral compositions. So it's not in the water. I'm sorry New York, but it's absolutely not true. And we've done many experiments with New York City Water. We've done experiments with Seattle water, and it comes down to good technique and good execution. Water is not a magical ingredient.

This is not to say that you can just use any water. For example, if it's water that you wouldn't drink, meaning if it smells funny or it's slimy or it's got like an off color, you wouldn't drink it. Also, you wouldn't make dough with it. So as long as it's pure water, it's clean, and it's something that you would drink. It's perfectly fine to make some to dough. All right, let's go to the phones because there is a lot of interest. Let's go to Athens, Georgia. Claire, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi. Hi there. Go ahead. So I have a question about sourdough. I was recently gifted a sourdough starter from Canada from like 1965. And the family that gave it to me taught me that bread recipe that was essentially just, flour, water, and sweetener, plus the sourdough starter. But I haven't been able to get my sourdough to be as light as theirs is.

It's always a really dense structure. So you want to know how to make it lighter? Yeah. There's a number of things that you could do. The first thing is that you need to make sure that your sourdough is actually vibrant and happy and full of life, meaning that is it bubbly, does it smell like, you know, like a little bit like yogurt? Or is it inactive and sludgy? Is it basically when you feed it, does it do anything?

Because the amount of yeast that will be in it is also going to contribute to how many, basically how much CO2 is going to form during fermentation. And so that's going to make for a lighter crumb structure dough. I noticed, and maybe you just skipped over this, but you said that there were three ingredients, and you didn't mention salt. And salt is extremely important. A lot of bread, if you mix it without salt, it just doesn't taste good, and it just doesn't form a very good dough. Salt helps with the dough structure.

So maybe it was just an oversight. But anyway, the point is that if it's very dense, it could also be the type of flour that you're utilizing. It's a good idea to always utilize strong flowers for making bread. And you might be using a whole wheat flour, and whole wheat has bran and germ. Brand and germ are what are called water-loving, meaning they love to absorb and pull water away from things, and they absorb a lot of water. So that could be bringing the volume and the density of your loaf down. So it could be a number of things, and maybe you're not fermenting it long enough, not being patient, because that's one of the key.

ingredient that is, it's not an actual ingredient, but it's time, right? And that's one of the things that people like just want to speed up. And with sourdough especially, you can't, or shouldn't, rather. How do you know, I tried, I have a couple of loaves of bread I made up on our website, Science Friday.com. And I tried to use the Michael Pollan, Sander Katz method of leaving just sit out on the counter without putting any yeast in it and letting it just collect the air. And I had a lot of trouble getting it to bubble up. I left it there for days. And it just was getting trouble bubbling. What did I do wrong?

How do I make that easier to get that ferment going? So the most important thing to realize is that in the flour that you buy is where you're going to find most of the yeast and the lactic acid bacteria, basically that they were on the field, now they're in your flour, and that's what's going to be activated when you add the water. So if you mixed your water and your flour and it wasn't looking very happy and it wasn't, you know, like starting to bubble, it could be a number of things. It could be that, you know, maybe your kitchen was a little too warm. It could be that maybe it needed a little bit more TLC, meaning maybe you needed to feed it a little bit more frequently before you started, you know, working on, you know, making your dough.

So there's a number of things that you can do as well. I like to combine, like if I'm starting from zero, I'll combine water and flour. And a nice trick to add into the equation is to add a little bit of rye flour. The rye flour has a lot of substrates that yeast really loves. And so it really helps to, you know, get that yeast activity going. Even chickpea flour too is great. Like a little tiny bit of it is just yeast goes crazy for that. And it's keeping it at a moderate temperature.

You want to be around 70 degrees if you can. So if you have a hot room or hot kitchen, maybe find a basement where you can put it in. There's a possibility maybe the container that you had been holding them in. It was, you know, maybe there was something in it that, you know, the yeast didn't like. But it's the biggest thing is to just wait and be patient. So if you do a one-to-one eagle parts, water and flour, and it's in a cool place, between three and four days, you should start to see some activity. If you don't start over, it's better to just start over than to try to make something that is not really showing any signs of life to make it work. So that little bit of rye that I said earlier or that little bit of chickpea flour are really going to get things going for you.

That's a good suggestion. I'm going to try my next batch. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking with Francisco Magoya, who is a head chef at Modernist Cuisine and co-author of the Modernist Bread. book. I really, it's a beautiful book. I mean, beautifully laid out. And I thought

about, you know, when you go into a restaurant how you presentation is important in the dish, and presentation seemed to be important in your book. How are you really laying it out? Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, an important thing to remark is that this is about five years of the lives

of 25 people who, you know, we dedicated all this time to writing this book. And so it's, you know, we're, most human beings really like to have that visual aspect be appealing and thus the success of, you know, like Instagram, for example. You have, you know, beautiful pictures. People are going to like that. And so in our book that what we really make an effort to us to have beautiful pictures, but also pictures that are maybe from angles you've never seen before or things that you may not have seen, like the inside of an oven.

We cut ovens in half. We cut mixers in half. We cut Dutch ovens in half so you can see how, you know, bread is baked. inside a Dutch oven so that it's basically this see-through of how things work and it really helps to show and to make a point across when you can see through things. We have another beautiful picture of dough fermenting, you know, what happens and it's, and we actually have a video of that which is a time lapse of how those CO2 bubbles form and how the dough expands and it's just amazing to watch.

So it's a different view and it's a very, I think, I think it's a very, I think it's a very, I I think very pedagogical way of showing things as well. I'm going to play one more cut from our Vox Pop listeners. Maybe we'll answer on the other side if we don't have a time before the break. And they're asking how to adjust a lot of people, asking how to adjust their bread recipes when they move to different cities. I was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania and got pretty good at baking breads. Now that I live in Houston, I have a lot of trouble baking bread,

and I suspect it is because of the high humidity. What are some tips that I can use to improve my bread baking skills in high humidity? Michelle from Houston asking that. Francisco, what do you say? Yeah, so hand in hand with high humidity comes what? High heat, right? I mean, that's typically a, you know, the one-two punch. And it is an enemy of making bread simply because high humidity and high heat means the dough is going to ferment on you very quickly.

So there's a few things you can make to adjust for that. And the first is, you know, I don't know. I would say the ideal case scenario is that you have temperature control. If you have air conditioning, what you're going to have is, you know, a room that is about 70 degrees, which is ideal. But it also helps to dry the air out, right? Because air conditioners do that. They pull moisture out. But maybe you don't have it.

And so some of the things that you can do is when you're mixing your dough, start with very cold water. And if you start with very cold water, what it's going to do is it's going to slow down the fermentation process. In fact, if it's really, really hot in the kitchen you're working in, some bakeries even keep their bags of flour and refrigeration so that as it's mixing and you're creating this friction, the dough doesn't get too warm. The other thing that might be happening that she might be having a problem with is that the dough is pretty sticky because it's too wet because of the humidity.

So a way around that is to just be generous with the flour when you're basically shaping your dough and when you're handling it. Don't be afraid to use excess flour. You're able to kind of like brush it, off before it goes into the oven if it's too much of it, but it also helps keep things from sticking. And if you don't like the flowery look, some people use, like, you know, oil. They put a little bit oil on their hands and the work table, and it helps to manipulate and work with the dough. So those are the two things I would do. I would get a thermometer, too. I mean, this is one of the things that

can make your life a lot easier, is if you're able to get water out of the tap and you add a little bit of ice to it and you start, let's say, with water that's at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Fahrenheit, this is going to be a way for you to be able to control how your dough is fermenting. And it's going to give you more time. And that's, you know, that's one of the problems we have. It's like if the dough starts to move very quickly and it starts to ferment very quickly, we kind of panic, right? So this is one way to control that. I love controlling panic. We're talking with Francisco McGoya, who's author of the Modernist Bread Book. We're going to come back and talk lots more with him. 844724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll have a lot more food failure

after this. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We've been talking about the science of bread baking with Francisco Magoya, who is head chef at Modernist Cuisine, and a co-author of this wonderful new book about bread called Modernist Bread. A number 844724-8255. Let us go take a call. Let's go to Eileen in New Orleans. Hi there, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for taking my call. Hi, go ahead. I often like to switch out from the, or change flowers up a bit. Instead of using all of the unbleached white flour, I might want to put in a cup of spelt or a cup of rye, you know, a whole grain. And oftentimes I have rising failure when I mess with that. And I'm wondering what I can do in advance to compensate for changing up the, adding a whole grain flour to my mix.

Good question. Yeah, the first thing I will tell you, and you're talking in volume measures, so the first thing you should do to avoid any sort of things up to chance is to get a scale and weigh your flour, because if you're adding cups of this and cups of that, I mean, I guarantee every time you measure a cup, it's going to have a different weight. So the first thing is weigh your flour. The second is if you're adding spelt, that's fine. If you're adding like a quarter of the weight of your flour and another flower, that's fine.

But what you want to do is that the regular unbleached flower you do, get a stronger flower. Get something that is going to have a, you know, basically it's going to be the spine that is going to hold everything up. Because when we add other flowers, when we add rye, when we add, you know, like iron corn or any, you know, like so-called ancient grains, these grains don't have a great capacity for, you know, developing a dough as strong as wheat flour does. And so a lot of bakers, what they do is they'll take, you know, a high percentage of a strong, like, bread flour and then combine it with other flowers. But there's always that structure-forming flour that helps basically keep everything strong and in place. So if you're buying something that says, you know, bread flour, I would say, you know, for example, King Arthur has this Sir Lancelot flower. it's super strong.

It's got like 14% protein. And so it'll be able to take in a good amount of other kinds of flowers and still give you a nice strong dough. Yeah, because we had a tweet from Valerie. He says, what about adding other things like tapioca, Xanthin, rice, or chickpeas? Well, I mean, you can add that, but not for making a dough stronger. None of those things have any dough forming properties. I mean, if you wanted to go like super purists, you can get gluten as a powder. and it's, I forget, oh, Bob's Red Mill sells gluten flour.

And so that's, that you're literally adding strength. It's like a vitamin B shot to your dough. And, you know, even a little bit, if you add like, you know, 1% of the weight of your flour in gluten, it's enough to make a difference and to really make your dough super strong. There's a lot of science behind us. Let's go to our vox pop. We have Grace from Seoul, Korea. had a question about ovens.

Hello, Science Friday. I've been doing all my baking in a toaster oven. I was wondering if you had any tips or tricks to help make my breads and cookies a little bit better. You ever hear anybody baking in a toaster oven? No. It doesn't mean you can't, but that's super brave to make a bread in a toaster oven just because it's, they're, you know, if a home oven is not so good for making artisan bread, A toaster oven is actually a few steps behind that. The biggest thing, I would say, is that, you know, what you're looking for is to have, like, this constant heat, like high heat on your dough to make sure that you're getting, you know, first of all, that oven spring.

But also, you know, that's why we like to use what it's called a cast iron combination cooker in home ovens. It's basically a cast iron. It's like a skillet and a pot that fit together nicely, so they create this airtight environment. So we preheat our oven with those together, and once we're ready to bake the bread, we put it in the skillet part of the combination cooker, score it, and then put the lid on top of it.

And so that cast iron not only absorbed the heat beautifully, it's like this black, dense metal, but it also radiates it really nice into the dough, like in a very constant, steady stream. and you have also the benefit that it produces its own steam. So you don't have to be doing all these things like throwing water in the oven or ice cubes or all these things that basically create an irregular or inconsistent amount of steam. Think about this.

Every time you open your oven door, you're opening one-sixth of it. That's a huge amount of space to open because all the heat escapes. But if you have a castoran combination getting hot in there, it stays hot. Right. And the thing is, I don't know how big your toaster oven is. but if you could get a cast iron pot or a pot that you can fit your dough into, it's going to really help bypass all of the issues that these types of ovens have. I want to bring on another guest who took his home experiments to the extreme.

He baked a piece of bread from an ancient strain of yeast, we think. Seamus Blackley is an amateur home baker. He's also a physicist and the inventor of the Xbox. A truly Renaissance man. Welcome to Science Friday. Well, thanks, Ira. Thanks for that crazy compliment. Yeah, well, this isn't your first try using ancient needs to bake bread.

Tell us about how this all came about. Well, like a lot of nerdy guys, I have been baking bread for a long time and got really into sourdough. And largely just because it's a challenge. And I started to get into these so-called ancient grains also, largely because it's such a pain to make a decent loaf of bread with them. And, you know, it's a slippery slope from there. And I found myself collecting yeast in crazy places and learning a lot about yeast and different doughs and techniques and slid inexorably into another passion of mine, which is Egyptology, when a sample of a supposed ancient Egyptian yeast became available from some brewing friends of

mine. So I tried making bread with it, and it was pretty good. And then there was a discovery about this ancient Egyptian, yeast inside a tomb? Well, yeah, that brewers yeast was, you know, ostensibly scraped off the inside of some old brewing pots. And when you scrape an old archaeological sample like that, what you're basically getting is museum dirt, right?

So a lot of people, a lot of Egyptologists, a lot of microbiologists who followed my crazy baking experiment on Twitter, basically called me out and said, hey, you don't know what that is. You have to do better. And so I asked for their help. And together we came up with a methodology for extracting dormant microorganisms from the insides of the ceramic matrix of some of this ancient Egyptian pottery. I have two partners in Egyptologist Dr. Serena Love and a microbiologist Richard Bowman at University of Iowa, who helped me to develop a non-invasive technique for extracting dormant stuff out of the middle of pots.

Wow. I want to go to the phone call, to the phones to Daniel and Houston, who has sort of a similar. experience, Daniel? Good afternoon, yes, I do. Tell us about it. So I've been baking with sourdough for a little over 10 years, and the neighbor of mine offered me a

strain of sourdough starter that he said was ancient Egyptian, and it turned out pretty good. I was just wondering, how could you prove that that's actually an ancient strain of yeast there that I got? I mean, it could be anything. I couldn't tell. So what's the science behind all that?

Well, it's a few things. Sorry. First of all, you need to be sure that you collected this sample from a place, from a vessel where there's actually a chance that the yeast and other microorganisms in a bread starter could have survived. Because they go dormant if they don't have water and food. And it's not the outside of a pot. It would be the inside. After you use a pot a bunch, you drive some of these microorganisms into the ceramic itself. And then after you collect it, you have to.

do very carefully and with good microbiological technique, keep it sterile. Keep other modern organisms away from it. So when we feed these things in the lab, we use lab feeds. And when I bake with them, my kitchen looks kind of like a laboratory. We have sterilizers and UV lights and flames. And we sterilize all the flour that we feed the sample with so that we're sure that we don't contaminate the original sample of anything new. So it's really just being careful, washing stuff a lot.

and, you know, being careful, you don't cough into your starter. And how did you cook it? Well, so I'm a physicist, so I have this sort of, you know, thing that I do where we try a single thing at a time and make sure we know what we're doing. So I started out making a normal sort of modern, Western French-style bread with it in a basket just to see what the yeast is like and see if it would work. And I fed it emmer flour, which is the flour that we know the ancient agenda. Egyptians used, at least in the old kingdom when they were building the pyramids, to make bread. And it really liked it. It developed instantly.

It behaved beautifully. And as those of your listeners and your other guests know, baking with these old flowers is very hard to do. It takes years of practice, years of horrible brick-like loaves. But this stuff just took off on this ancient flour, which gave me confidence, incidentally, that it was genuine. And so I just slowly learned how to bake with it, and then increasingly started to bake using traditional ancient Egyptian techniques, which don't use an oven. So it's very different from what we think of when we think of baking bread. Francisco, what do you think of this whole escapade here?

I have so many questions, but it's, I mean, how do you, what type of yeast strain was this? Do you know what strains you had? Yeah, so we are currently doing DNA and RNA analysis on our samples, and we're continuing to collect samples. So part of the deal is to know that you have something, you have to have a lot of statistics, the science thing. You need to make sure that, you know, you interrogate a whole bunch of pottery and you find a signal in it, which is a truly potentially ancient organism. Then we can look at its DNA and get clues as to its age from the microbiology itself, from the RNA, and see what it's real. related to. Finally, you know, you can look and investigate the behavior of these things as you feed and collect them. And the strains that we think are suspect, the guys that we think are

actually old, behave differently in a lot of different ways from modern yeast. And most modern yeast that we collect even in nature are related. In fact, it's greatly proliferated, you know, everywhere in the world. These act a little bit differently. And so our suspicion is than our related, but we don't know yet. We have a lot more work to do. Good luck to you. Thank you for sharing your experience with, Seamus. Thanks for having me on.

It's great to have a geek who's a baker at the same time. Seamus Blackley is an amateur home baker and also physicist and inventor of the Xbox. With me is Francisco Magoya, who is a head chef at Modernist Cuisine and the co-author of the Modernist Breadbook. And just to remind you, there's a recipe from the breadbook, modernist bread, up on our website at ScienceFriada.com. slash bread fails. So if you'd like to get in on that. Let me see if I can get a phone call or two more before we have to go. Let's go to Dayton in Tallahassee. Hi, Dayton. How are you? Thank you very much for having me on. My question is about, so then on the topic of yeast, east of course, provide the carbonation and all that in the bread. What about different flavor profiles? Are different species

of yeast being explored rather than servici? I believe it's the name of Servici for bread. Before you answer that, let me remind everybody that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I love that he asked this question, mostly because when we think about sourdough, we have this tendency to zero in on the yeast. And the dominant strain of yeast in most sourdough starch is going to be saccharomycese, which is basically the yeast that really likes to eat starch. And that's the yeast that you're going to find in the fields where wheat grows, where grains grow. It's the yeast that when you grind up your grains to turn them into flour, it mixes into the flour. And, you know, it's what provides us with fermentation. But a lot of people seem to forget about a very important component of sourdough starters, which is a lactic acid

bacteria. And the reason why it should matter to us more than the yeast is because lactic acid bacteria actually outnumbers yeast 100 to 1. That's not a little bit. That's nothing to frown down upon. I mean, it's 100 to 1. And the reason why this is also important is because the lactic acid bacteria is what's going to determine the flavor profile and the personality of everybody's sourdough starter. Everybody's is going to be different because of whatever that mix of lactic acid bacteria is in there.

So you can change the flavor and adjust the flavor of your sourdough starter simply by, first of all, what temperature do you keep it at? Why? Because some lactic acid bacteria prefer colder temperatures, and so then they secrete a particular flavor of acid, more the ones that prefer the colder temperatures secrete more yogurt-like flavors into your sourdough starter. Where the lactic acid bacteria, that is, it's basically homo-fermentative, that prefers the hotter temperatures, what they secrete is more of like the acidic acid, which is that acid that you associate with vinegar. So you get these like really puckered up sourdose with that.

you can train your sourdough like a pet, which is, it's a remarkable thing. I mean, these microorganisms adapt, and they adapt and they thrive, and, you know, depending on what conditions they're in. And you can also adjust the flavor by basically how often you feed it, what, you know, how much flour you feed it, what mixture of flowers you're feeding it. But very important, everybody with your sourdough, try to feed your sourdough more or less at the same time every day because it's like a pet, and it gets used to that sketch. of feeding it'll know how much food it has for how much time.

So train it to learn that curve. And the second thing is try to keep it more or less at the same temperature every day. These temperature fluctuations are really going to kill your sourdough starter if you don't treat it right. I keep mine in a wine fridge because my wine fridge is at 55 degrees Fahrenheit and the east is just happy enough and I get that yogurt flavor profile from it that I prefer over that like super acidic sourdough. Wow, that's interesting. Let me see if I can get a quick tweet from Teresa who says,

I'd love to know why my pizza crust will get really crispy but doesn't brown. I use zero flour, double zero flour, and semolina mix. Wow. I got a minute for you to answer that. Yeah, typically when pizza crust don't brown is because they've over-fermented. If you think of what is browning and what is creating that myard reaction is the sugars that are in the starch, which is basically sugars, it's a complex sugar. If the yeast has depleted this food, this sugar, and there's no available sugar, it's not going to brown.

You're not going to get that nice my reaction. So typically, when you get a really pale loaf is because your dough has fermented too long. So it'll bake, it'll crisp up, but it won't have that nice brown color that we usually like to associate with pizza. There you have it. Francisco Magoya Head Chef at Modernist Cuisher. also co-author of the Modernist Bread Book, and there is a recipe from Modernist Bread on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash bread fails,

and the Modernist Cuisine book is just excellent. Thank you, Francesco, for taking time to be with us today. This was great. Thank you. And we want to hear your voice on Science Friday. We have an app for the Science Friday Vox Pop app, which lets you record your own voice and play you on the air, and we want you to download the app, and we need your contribution for an upcoming show.

Tell us, have you move? or thought about relocating because of climate change where you live? Have you moved or thought about relocating because of climate change where you live? Let us know on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps, and it's really great. We've been playing some of them on the show today, and we really would like to hear. One more time, tell us, have you moved or thought about relocating because of climate change where you live? That's about all the time we have for now.

I hope you got some great, I got some great breadmaking tips today. I hope you did too. I'm Ira Flato in New York.