Chapter 7: Hydration

The ratio mattered. Everything in bread was ratio — flour to water, salt to flour, levain to dough, time to temperature — and of all the ratios the one that mattered most was hydration, the percentage of water relative to flour, expressed as a number that told you more about the bread than any other single piece of information. Sixty percent hydration produced a tight, dense crumb, the kind of bread you could slice thin for sandwiches, the kind that held its shape and lasted and submitted to the knife without crumbling, a well-behaved bread, a bread that did what it was told. Eighty percent hydration produced a wild, open crumb, the bread full of holes and air and irregularity, the texture almost custardy, the crust thin and crackling and dramatic, a bread that defied the knife and tore instead of sliced and went stale in a day and was, if you understood bread, the more beautiful of the two, the way a river was more beautiful than a canal, both carrying water but one shaped by human intention and the other shaped by the land.

Her mother's bread was seventy-two percent. Marguerite had baked at seventy-two percent for three weeks now, following the recipe without deviation, the discipline of the apprentice, the adherence to form that precedes the departure from form. But she was beginning to feel the limitations. Seventy-two percent was her mother's hydration, arrived at over decades of adjustment, a number that reflected Thérèse's flour and Thérèse's oven and Thérèse's hands, and Marguerite's flour was the same and her oven was the same but her hands were not, her hands were different, the strength different, the technique different, the way she handled wet dough different from her mother's way, and the hydration that was right for Thérèse might not be right for Marguerite, and this was not a metaphor but a fact — every baker had a hydration, a natural percentage that suited her hands and her style, the way every river had a gradient that suited its geology, and baking at the wrong hydration was like running water uphill, possible with enough energy but unnatural, unsustainable, wrong.

She decided to experiment.

The decision was small but it felt enormous, the way all first departures feel enormous, the first step off the known path, the first deviation from the recipe, the first time you do something your mother did not do. She increased the hydration to seventy-five percent. Three percent. Thirty grams of water per kilogram of flour. An amount you could hold in a cupped hand. An amount that, in any other context, would be trivial.

In bread it was a revolution.

The dough was wetter. Immediately, obviously, alarmingly wetter. The extra thirty grams of water per kilo changed everything — the texture, the handling, the behaviour during mixing and folding and shaping, the relationship between the dough and her hands. The dough stuck. It clung to her fingers and to the bench and to the bowl and refused to be shaped, the extra water dissolving the surface tension that held the dough together, the ball spreading on the bench like a puddle, the rounds refusing to tighten, the pre-shape collapsing, and she stood at the bench at seven in the morning with flour on her forearms and dough on her hands and a feeling in her chest that was not panic but was closely related to panic, the feeling of a baker who has lost control of the dough.

She knew what to do. She knew — intellectually, theoretically, from watching her mother and from the books she had begun to read, borrowing them from the library in La Pocatière, books on artisan baking and fermentation and the science of bread — that wet dough required a different approach. Less handling. More folds. Wetter hands. A lighter touch. The instinct was to add flour, to dry the dough out, to bring it back to a hydration she could control, but adding flour would change the ratio and the ratio was the point, the whole point, the reason she had added the extra water in the first place was to produce a more open crumb, and an open crumb required high hydration, and high hydration required a baker who could handle it.

She could not handle it. Not yet.

She folded. One fold every thirty minutes instead of every forty-five, the extra folds building strength, the gluten developing faster, the dough tightening incrementally with each round of stretch and fold, the structure emerging from the chaos the way order always emerged from chaos in bread — not because the baker imposed it but because the dough wanted it, the gluten proteins aligning themselves the way iron filings align in a magnetic field, the structure self-organizing given the right conditions, and the right conditions for high-hydration dough were time and gentle handling, not the aggressive kneading that worked at sixty percent but the patient folding that worked at seventy-five, the dough responding to persuasion rather than force.

After the fourth fold the dough began to cooperate. She could feel it — a change in the texture, a cohesion, the dough pulling together, the strands of gluten connecting and holding, the surface developing a sheen that indicated development, the wet sticky mass transforming into something that was still wet but was no longer sticky, the water bound now, incorporated into the gluten network, held in place by the protein structure, and the dough moved as a single mass when she tilted the bowl, a slow graceful shift that was different from the loose slop of an underdeveloped dough, different from the tight resistance of an overdeveloped one, a middle state, a balance, and she recognized it — not from her own experience, which was too limited, but from watching her mother, from the thousands of hours of observation that she had accumulated without knowing she was accumulating them, the data stored in her eyes, in the part of her brain that processed visual information, and the visual information said: this dough is ready.

She pre-shaped. The rounds were softer than she was used to, the surface tension less pronounced, the dough spreading on the bench with a laziness that might have been relaxation or might have been weakness, and she did not know which, and the not knowing was the condition of the experiment, the condition of all experimentation, the willingness to be wrong, the acceptance that failure was not the opposite of learning but was learning, the most efficient form of learning, the form that left the deepest impression, the way a burn left a deeper impression than a warning.

She shaped. The letter fold, the tight roll, but tighter than usual, compensating for the extra hydration, the extra slack, the seam pressed firmly with the heel of her hand, and the shaped loaves went into the bannetons and the bannetons went into the refrigerator, and she stood at the bench and looked at her hands, which were wet and wrinkled from the water in the dough, the skin of her fingertips puckered, and she thought about the day she had increased the hydration and how it had felt like defiance and was probably just growth, the natural progression of a baker who was beginning to find her own way, the way a river finds its own way, not by choosing a path but by following the terrain, the water going where the land takes it, and the land of Marguerite's baking was taking her toward wetter dough, toward a more open crumb, toward a bread that was not her mother's bread but was not not her mother's bread either, a bread that was related to Thérèse's the way a daughter was related to her mother, genetically connected but phenotypically distinct, the same culture expressed in a different hand.

She baked the loaves the next morning. The oven was at two hundred and fifty-eight degrees, close enough, and she scored them with the lame — a single long arc, her mother's signature cut — and loaded them onto the hot soapstone and closed the door and waited. The waiting was different this time. The waiting had an edge to it, a charge, the anticipation of discovery, the not-knowing that preceded every experiment, the moment before the results were in, and she stood by the oven door and listened for the sounds of baking — the ticking, the crackling, the small percussive pops of crust forming — and she heard them, and they sounded the same as always, the same sounds her mother's bread made, the same physics, the same chemistry, the fire and the dough doing what fire and dough had always done, indifferent to the three percent change in hydration that had consumed Marguerite's morning and her confidence and her sleep.

She pulled the loaves after thirty-nine minutes. They were darker than usual — the extra water had produced more steam, and the steam had delayed the crust formation, allowing the sugars on the surface more time to caramelize, the Maillard reaction proceeding further than usual, and the crust was a deep mahogany, almost brown, the colour of dark honey, the colour of autumn, and the ears had opened dramatically, the grignes gaping, the flaps of crust curling upward and backward, crisp and thin and fragile, and the loaves were beautiful in a way that surprised her, because she had not expected beauty, had expected only data, the results of the experiment, but the data was beautiful, the bread was beautiful, the colour and the shape and the ears and the overall form were beautiful in the way that a thing is beautiful when it has been made honestly and without pretence, when the maker's hand is visible in the making.

She let them cool. She cut the first loaf.

The crumb was different. She could see it before the knife was through — the holes larger, more irregular, the structure more open, the gluten walls between the holes thinner and more translucent, the light passing through them the way light passes through stained glass, coloured and transformed. The crumb was not her mother's crumb. It was wilder. It was more dramatic. It was, she thought with a shock of recognition, more like the crumb in the books she had been reading, the photographs of artisan bread from France and San Francisco and Copenhagen, the bread that was made by bakers who pushed the hydration to its limits and shaped with a precision that came from years of practice, and she was not those bakers, she was Marguerite Deschênes of Kamouraska, three weeks into baking alone, and the crumb in front of her was the crumb of a beginner's luck, a first attempt that had succeeded not because of skill but because of the culture and the flour and the oven, all of which were exceptional, all of which were the accumulated quality of a hundred and thirty years, and the baker — she — had merely not gotten in the way.

She tasted it.

The flavour was different. Subtly, but different. The higher hydration had produced a moister crumb, and the moisture carried flavour differently — the wheat more pronounced, the fermentation more present, the tang softer, more integrated, the overall impression wetter and more alive, the bread tasting of what it was, which was flour and water and salt and time, the four ingredients present and accounted for, no one hiding, no one dominant, a balance that was not the same balance her mother achieved but was a balance nonetheless, a different chord played on the same instrument.

She cut a piece and wrapped it in a cloth and put it in her bag for the hospital.

Thérèse smelled it before she saw it. The left nostril flared — the right side of the face did not participate — and Marguerite held the bread close and watched her mother's eye track the bread, the pupil dilating slightly, the focus sharpening, and she broke the piece in half and held it so that Thérèse could see the crumb, the open structure, the large irregular holes, and she said, "Soixante-quinze pour cent."

Thérèse's eye moved from the bread to Marguerite's face. The gaze was sharp. Critical. The eye of a baker assessing another baker's bread, and for a moment the stroke was irrelevant, the paralysis was irrelevant, the hospital and the monitors and the tube in her arm were all irrelevant because the eye was whole, the eye was Thérèse's, the intelligence behind it undiminished, and the assessment was real and was happening now, the mother judging the daughter's bread, and Marguerite felt herself hold her breath the way she held her breath when she opened the oven door, the moment of revelation, the moment when the bread showed itself and the baker saw what she had made.

The left corner of Thérèse's mouth lifted. Not a smile. A quarter of a smile. A fraction. But it was approval, or something adjacent to approval, the recognition of a baker who has seen another baker take a step, a small step, a three-percent step, in the right direction, and Marguerite exhaled and sat down and held her mother's hand and they stayed like that, the bread between them on the blanket, the smell of it filling the room, displacing the disinfectant and the institutional green and the particular smell of sickness, and for a few minutes the room smelled like a bakery, which was the same as saying it smelled like home.

"Pah," said Thérèse.

"Oui, maman. Pain."

Marguerite drove home that evening through the first real snow of the season. It had begun while she was in the hospital — fine, dry flakes, the kind that fell when the temperature was well below zero, the snow not so much falling as materializing, the flakes appearing in the headlights like static on a television screen, a visual noise, a white interference, and the road was covered already, a thin layer that the tires crunched through, the sound satisfying, a small percussion. The snow continued through the night and by morning there were fifteen centimetres on the ground and the village was white and quiet and changed, the November grey replaced by December white, the transformation overnight, the landscape re-made while the village slept, and Marguerite walked to the bakery in the dark through new snow that squeaked under her boots and she felt something she had not felt in weeks, which was not happiness — that word again, too large, too ambitious — but something closer to alignment, the sensation of being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, the way the dough felt when the hydration was right, not too wet, not too dry, the water and the flour in the correct relationship, the ratio balanced, the baker and the bread and the day and the season and the snow and the river and the culture in the crock all held in a proportion that was not perfect but was close enough. Within the tolerance. Workable. For now, for this morning, for this walk through the snow in the dark to the bakery that was hers and was not hers and was becoming hers — enough.

She fed the starter.

She increased the hydration to seventy-six percent.