Apple juice, champagne and a wood-fired oven, with Jack Lang and Jill Grey
above, a hot crisp thin-crust pizza, made with a naturally-leavened dough, straight out of Jack Lang's brick oven in Cambridge
he aims of the home baker are varied. For some, the only thing important is to produce a loaf cleanly with minimal effort. Bread machines fill the tin for those that desire convenient baking. But for others it’s the thrill of the effort, going after excellence and a primitive baking experience. Grinding the wheat for freshly milled flour, nursing a natural starter through it’s infancy to full-blown fermentation, blending grains and flours to create a personal mix of dry ingredients…
above, a thick layer of fragrant thyme grows on the warm roof of the wood-fired oven
Back in 2003, Jack Lang, ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ at the University of Cambridge, and his partner Jill hosted an apple pressing day at their modern farmhouse in Cambridgeshire. Now, if you (like me) have ever wandered past the laden boughs of apple trees in late summer, and wondered what will happen to all of the fruit, this is one solution.
Within a small community, it makes sense to get together and turn the task of pulping and pressing several hundredweight of crisp sweet apples into an enjoyable weekend-long affair. So over one weekend in September, colleagues and friends of Jack and Jill collect the apples, help force them through a garden shredder, and then tip the apple bits into a hand-cranked press. Fresh apple juice with champagne (not a ‘Bellini’, more a ‘Normandie) wets the tongues of the workers.
Jill was left with the herculean task of cleaning up after the baking and apple pressing. If you have ever had to clean up after a baker, you will understand the trouble it takes to get the dough off every surface. That glutinous mixture of wheat-flour and water bonds to the tap handles, the cupboard doors, anything the baker touches.
But this was the only downside to a glorious day baking bread and pizza. When I arrived on the Sunday morning, Jack had on the kitchen table the dough that would be baked that day: a large batch of sour pizza dough and rye dough, placed alongside two loaves that had just come out of the Aga oven and sat cooling.
The kitchen looks out over an old orchard that surrounds the house. Apples are scattered on the ground underneath the trees, and to one side sits the brick oven, looking like a small house.
above, the craftsman at work, Jack Lang in a quiet moment on the baking day.
I asked Jack how he got started in baking. “I was at University and had a girlfriend who was a good cook”, he said, “and that got me started. After we split up, I still continued to cook, and gradually developed a mild interest baking. But it was later, after I had spent time in San Francisco, that my interest really took off”. Jack’s brother Charles became friendly with Ian Duffy (when he was the baker at the outstanding Daily Bread bakery in Boulder, Colorado. Ian now resides at Cook Natural Products, in Oakland, California, a leading distributor of Organic flour). ”He introduced Charles to sourdough baking”, says Jack, “and fired his enthusiasm to learn (a lot) more about baking. I brought back one of those Gold Rush sourdough starter packs, which was good. But after a week or so the flavour changed and it lost that sharp, vibrant acidity. So I decided I had to do better.”
It was at that time that Jack made the decision to eat better bread. ” I remember saying to Jack in his early bread-making days” says Jill, “that he should bake bread on a regular basis…. just keep at, keep at it, keep at it, and it would ‘come right’ in time – something I learned for myself in an earlier life when raising a family and baking all their bread”.
“Today”, says Jack, “I bake less, probably every week, but I still bake for friends on occasions.” The weather outside was warm and just starting to get sunny, as the light broke through the bank of clouds that had threatened the morning. We started baking a test pizza first, after a glass of apple juice mixed with champagne. As the oven was blisteringly hot, it seemed best to keep the dough ultra thin, with a light smear of tomato sauce, studded with pitted black olives, the odd anchovy, and a light drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. The peel was dusted with yellow cornmeal, and the pizza quickly slid onto the hot stones on the base of the oven.
above, straight out of the oven, Jack's sourdough loaf sits on the stainless steel pizza peel.
“We needed to replace an old BBQ that we had in the garden”, said Jack, “and decided to replace it with a brick oven. It was Jill who urged me to think about building a brick oven in the garden. We had been out to visit friends, who had a house near Poitiers in France. They uncovered a brick oven in an outhouse in their garden, built early last century which, would have been used as the communal oven for the village. So I helped them clean it out and fire it up again. I had taken out to France a sourdough starter that I had cultivated in the UK, so we mixed that with flour from the local supermarket, and baked our first loaf in the revived oven. So by then, I had that gleam in my eye….”
“When we got back, I started looking on the web to try and purchase an oven, and it seemed to be easier to build our own. At the time, we had builders working on an extension to the house. So we purchased a refractory shell (the dome that sits above the sole of the bakery oven) from a company in France, Four Grandmere, and had the builders spend a little time with some extra bricks building the side walls for the oven, insulated with vermiculite.
above, hunks of sour white dough sit ready to be rolled out, on a sunlit bench set up by the wood-fired oven in the garden.
“Traditional wood-fired ovens are very good at maintaining steady, even heat”, said Jack, “and are by design very economical. And equally, naturally leavened breads are very easy to manage, especially for the home baker, as the dough matures more slowly and the point when the loaf finally gets to the oven is less critical. I am convinced that naturally leavened breads, like sourdough, are great for the home baker and less problematic that other quicker yeasted breads.”
We took the pizza out of the oven, and quickly cut it into pieces. It had just a faint smoky hint to the crust, whish was both hot and crisp but tender inside (it’s always a shame when the base dries out to something that resembles a cracker). After this first test, we bowed out and let other people roll their own pizza.
above, a loaf of rye bread fresh from the Aga oven sits cooling on the kitchen table
And what if you don’t have a wood-fired oven? “Well, here we have an Aga, which is very good for baking bread. Domestic ovens often don’t get hot enough. Also, the Aga is very good at retaining the steam inside the oven, as it only has a small outlet for the steam. I just throw a cup of water into the base of the oven with the bread, and that produces a beautifully glazed loaf. ”
I left the day just wishing I had a big garden, and the drive to build my own oven. Below, Jack shares with us his seven tips for successful home baking:
1. Use a naturally-leavened starter. “Using a sourdough starter is easy,” says Jack. “You keep it in the fridge from one month until the next, and simply refresh a small amount when you need to use it”
2. Keep practicing your ‘baking routine’ until you find a method that suits you. “It was the constant baking that improved my breads”, says Jack.
3. “For many of the breads I bake”, says Jack, “I make the dough the night before and leave it overnight in the refrigerator”. This is a great help in managing your time when baking at home, when there are always other things to do.
4. Do keep a record of the temperatures of your flour, water, dough and room when you bake. “Temperature control is very important when you bake”, says Jack, “but don’t go overboard with it”.
above, tucked up in their linen-lined baskets, two rye loaves sit slowly proving in the kitchen
5. “Food processors are great for mixing bread, just remember to use the steel blade”, says Jack. My co-author on “Baking with Passion”, Richard Whittington, swears by the food processor and finds it much easier to use than the upright mixer.
6. Remember that when you bake brown, mixed wheat, rye or wholemeal loaves, you will not get the same volume in the finished loaf as you will achieve with white flour, nor as open a texture to the crumb. Just remember this and be content.
7. And finally, “Bake the dough from cold”, says Jack, who lets his dough prove overnight in the refrigerator at 4ºC. This, he feels, gives a better result.
About Jack:
‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ at the University of Cambridge, and CEO of Artimi Ltd, Jack Lang founded NetChannel, which was eventually bought by NTL, where he continued as chief technologist. During a rich career, Jack founded five companies, including Topexpress, and the company that grew into E*Trade UK. Though he originally studied applied psychology at Sussex University, after a degree in Engineering at Cambridge, Jack then took a diploma in computer science at Cambridge, and an MA from Emmanuel. He is the author of “The High Tech Entrepreneurs Handbook – how to start and run a high tech business”, published by FT.com, and widely described as both a business angel (now there’s a sweet phrase) and a serial entrepreneur – always starting something new. Jack is recognized as one of the leading UK experts on mass-market computer systems, e-commerce, computer security, artificial intelligence and interactive television. Not only a keen baker, he is a passionate cook and founded the Midsummer House restaurant (in Cambridge) in 1984.
