Katy Murtaugh’s Next Big Adventure!

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Holy smokes! What a trip! I am so sorry I was ever critical of bread in Guinea; I take back anything bad I ever said about Guinean baguettes (except for it not having enough salt); they have to do so much work to produce what they produce that they deserve nothing but admiration. I am fascinated by this process and now feel like there producing a “pas mal” product given their conditions and their equipment.

There’s a women’s groupement here who has a center for girls’ education (for girls who otherwise won’t have the opportunity to go to school). They teach math, literacy, French and also technical skills like fabric dyeing. They, in the somewhat recent past, received a grant to build a bakery (a wood-burning clay/stone oven with a building built around it, with a little extra space for a baker to work) and have been looking for someone to teach their girls baking skills, enter Katy. We had a few false starts, but I finally got to spend some time (i.e., 7 hours) with the baker who uses the oven currently for baking baguettes to learn how to use it. Below I’ve outlined the completely impressive process for churning out 90+ baguettes in 7 hours with nothing but your two hands and this gargantuan oven. It’s a slightly detailed account, mainly for my own recollection purposes, but I also know that there are a few of you out there who will be as interested as I was in how the process works.

Side note as to the ridiculousness that happenes here sometimes: Dalaba has about 40,000 people in the town itself; I learned last night that it also has a total of 71 of these huge ovens. I simply cannot imagine how after 40 or so ovens, someone thought building another oven was a good idea, which clearly somebody did another 30 or so times. (Granted, this oven I’ll be using was probably the 71st.) Because of this plethora of ovens, and also bakers, there is a bakers’ association that creates a rotating schedule for who bakes/what ovens are in operation on any given day. Each day one half of the ovens/bakers are in use, and they alternate days. The amazing astonishment of this is that there is actually a practical and financial loss by letting an oven not be used for more than day at a time - an oven that has been brought fully up to temperature one day from cold (which takes at least 5 big, long, fat pieces of wood, 3,000GF each to 5,000 GF), can be brought up to temperature the next day in about half the time with about half the amount of wood. Every single baker in town is forced to use their oven in the most inefficient way possible, waiting just long enough for the oven to completely cool before firing it up again. On top of that, since baguettes are usually the only thing they bake in these ovens, no one makes any use of that residual heat to bake anything else that requires lower temperatures and it just goes away. I was amazed! I sort of thought it was in domains like these where practicality won out over everything else, especially when it came to being fiscally conservative, but it seems there was some decree of what “fairness” ordained in the face of more bakers and ovens than the town can employ.

Anyway, here’s what I witnessed:

Mixing
Even though baking happens at night when there is almost always electricity here in Dalaba, there’s not money for anyone to buy something like a big ol’ mixer, so the baguettes of Guinea (which are even more ubiquitous here than in France, given their lack of any competing breads) are made entirely by hand and are mixed entirely according to look and feel. First, roughly 25 kilos of flour goes into a trough (not dissimilar from Anne’s goats’ feeding trough, though higher off the ground), which is to say a 50 kilo sack is opened and about half of it goes in. A pre-measured “2 gram” plastic bag of salt is added (though was definitely more than 2 grams, given what I saw him measuring out, I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “gram” — he definitely didn’t mean gram, but he didn’t mean kilogram either, an unsolved mystery). A tomato paste can is used to measure out the yeast (good ol’ SAF instant yeast), and it looks like he’s shooting for about 3/4 of a can. He does his best to mix the dries thoroughly and spends at least 5 minutes with his arm swimming back and forth and down into the corners (although he may have been showing off for company). Then in one half of the trough, he starts to compress and pat down the flour, getting it ready to receive a deluge of water; he pours about half a bidon of water (at least the size of a Fry-on container, though it might be bigger….how quickly we forget) into that side and starts swinging his arm back and forth to incorporate the packed down flour underneath a little at a time; once the flour all they way to the bottom has been incoporated, he starts adding some of the flour from the other half of the trough, still one-armed, starting to scrape down the sides and check the corners. At some point it’s clear that more water is needed; the mixture is ressembling dough, but there’s still a bunch of flour left on the other side of the trough, so he makes a wet, sticky mess out of that remaining flour and combines his two mixtures. He’s now working the dough with one hand and adding more flour with other, trying to make the mass a less sticky one. Once he’s got the consistency he’s looking for (fairly wet and loose without being sticky), he repeatedly plunges both hands down into the dough and cuts off a big chunk of dough (like you would if you were plunging your hands into a river to grab a fat fish); the first few chunks (probably a tenth of the entire mass) go back on top of the pile making a space to the side of the trough where the following chunks get transferred as they get sectioned off. He goes through the whole mass of dough like this probably 7 or 8 times, every once in a while tossing some flour in around the edges to keep it from sticking. While he is certainly working the dough, it looks to me like this sectioning off serves more of a mixing role than a kneading role. The dough now rests for maybe 20 minutes or so.

Kneading
At this point he starts to give the dough double-fisted, straight-elbowed punches directly down into the dough; he seems to be putting the whole weight of his torso into it by way of his two fists and locked arms. (He speaks very little French, so I can’t ask him a million questions; the head of the woman’s groupement is there to be my translator.) He covers the dough with punches and then pulls the far side up and over the rest of the dough, another 10 punches or so, then pulls the near side up and over the rest of the dough, another 10 punches and then pulls the right side up and over the dough, another 10 punches or so and then pulls the left side up and over the rest of the dough - the punching/pulling routine was probably repeated three times, with one 10-15 minute rest in there somewhere. To me it seems like, after all that work, it is only approaching the desired smoothness, uniformity and slight tacki-ness. It looks like the gluten development is coming more from than the pulling than the punching, but it’s hard to say without it having been my hands punching down into it! Given the quantity of dough, this is the back-breaking step.

Bulk Rise, Portioning
After that it rises in the trough; tonight it rose for 30 or 40 minutes and didn’t even double, though I suspect the intention was for it to at least double because he later made a comment about not having added enough yeast. From here he weighs out “3 gram” portions of dough (looked to me like maybe 12 oz-ish), and as the table fills up, pre-shapes each portion into loose boules and lines them up. The dough is still fairly wet, though not sticky, and the boules grow into each other rather quickly. When all the dough is portioned (at least 40 minutes), the dough sits for another maybe 15 minutes and tonight it rose quite a bit on the table. The yield was 94 baguettes.

Shaping
He shapes his baguettes in almost the same way as I think of as being “Dan’s-way-of-rolling-Katy’s-way” - de-gassing, rolling it up in a nice compressed way, flattening again, folding the top edge down to the bottom edge, flattening again, folding the top edge down to the bottom edge again and firmly sealing the seam. To finish it off, he deliberately makes odd little extra bits on the end, which remind me of the unfortunate over-sized outie-belly buttons that are common here.

Final Rise
The baguettes rise on 2 portable shelves separated by canvas, seam-side up. The room tonight was an odd mix of temperatures between the no more than 65 degrees outside and the at least 500 degree oven about 3 feet away, and the baguettes seemed to feel the cold more than heat (the oven radiates amazingly little heat, there must be more effective insulation in the walls than I imagine) and took an hour plus to be ready.

Heating the Oven
The fire gets started in the oven with leftover coals and 3 or 4 new, fat, long pieces of wood about 7 PM. That burns with door of the oven open (and the front chimney open and the back chimney closed) until it stops producing a flame and is smoldering; then the door gets closed and it smolders until everything in the fire is white on top; then several fresh smaller, thinner pieces of wood get added and left to burn again with the door open. This time when it stops producing a flame the fire gets one fresh big piece of wood (I suppose maybe they’re called logs, English is failing me these days), and then maybe another once that one has stopped actively burning. The point of all this is to get the entire oven hot, hot, hot and to have it sustain that heat once the fire itself becomes a more mellow, hopefully constant, smoldering presence. I would say the oven is slightly larger than the size of Cafe Soleil’s copper counter area and probably 7 feet tall with an interior space that is probably 8 by 8 and no more than 3 feet high.

Cleaning the Oven
The oven has only one chamber, maybe it’s the same with these types of ovens in the States, I don’t know, but I had assumed that the fire was built in a separate chamber, probably below the baking chamber, but the fire is made in the same chamber that the bread is baked in. In order to evenly heat the oven in the first place, the fire is made right in the middle, then once the bread is nearing to be ready to be put in, the smoldering coals get shoved to one side of the oven, and THEN the baker has to wash the deck of the oven, because of course the bread is baked directly on the stone. First this involves a 9-foot-long stick (if not longer) with a metal half-moon on the end for scooping and shoveling the coals to one side, then a different 9-foot-long stick (if not longer) that the baker ties a bunch of t-shirts onto the end of to be dunked in water and used to swab down the part of the deck not occupied by coals. To start he does this about 4 times, re-dunking his t-shirt pole vault in a big bucket of water each time. This obviously cools down the oven a fair bit, which is fine because it is now well after midnight and the oven has been getting progressively hotter for the last 5-6 hours.

Gauging the Temperature
Once the deck is acceptably clean, he dusts it with a heavy smattering of flour and closes the door. It’s temperature reading time, if the flour burns in less than 1 minute, it’s too hot and the t-shirt pole vault goes back in for a few more passes, if the flour burns in about 2 minutes then it’s just right (I don’t think the oven is ever not hot enough, so I don’t know what they do at this point if they discover that the oven is too cool, probably scoop all the coals back into the center and get a little annoyed with themselves for making the bread such that it was ready before the fire and/or starting the fire too late). Tonight, the flour burned in less than 30 seconds, so the oven was too hot and got another 4 or so passes with the t-shirt pole vault.

Prepping Baguettes
Each shelf of baguettes (of about 45 or so) is dealt with in turn, with each baguette getting transferred onto the peel (which can hold three at a time), getting scored (one big, long slash right down the middle), and then getting brushed with a flour-water glaze (really thin, maybe 1 part flour to 8 or even 10 parts water, where half the water gets combined when it is hot but not boiling and then the entire mixture is made to boil in the oven) and then getting placed on the deck. Assuming a non-sprawling set of coals and a skilled baguette-placing baker, the oven can hold about 50 baguettes.

Baking
Generally, the maximum expected time to bake: 8 minutes! And if he’s got a big batch (50 kilos or 75 kilos of flour), he’ll save himself some time by keeping the oven pretty hot, such that the bake time is 4 minutes! It took at least 20 minutes to fully load the oven, with a lot of opening and closing of the door, I’m thinking his 4-8 minute count starts from when he closes the door for the last time on a full oven.

Resting
Once the bread is baked, albeit mostly rather unevenly, it gets pulled out on the peel and put on flour sacks until the kid sitting there feels like it’s not too hot to touch and he can “clean” it - he takes a rag and rubs down the bottom side of the baguette to get rid of (or try to get rid of) any of the ash that was still on the deck - then the baguettes get placed vertically in the mixing trough to cool, where they will wait until morning to be sold to vendors and individuals. One baguette might get broken into for a quality check. (Tonight he wanted “to make sure there’s not too much salt,” I almost laguhed out loud - it appears the extremely small amount of salt is an actual preference.)

It is now about 1:30 AM and the bakery needs to be broken down and cleaned, a full day for a Guinean baker. One side effect (of many) of baguettes being the only bread that’s made around here is that when the dough/bread is resting/rising, the baker has nothing else to do; he just sits and waits for the bread to be ready for the next step!

25 kilos flour (250,000 GF for a 50 kilo bag)
“2 g” salt
75% of a tomato paste can of yeast (instant)
80% of a bidon of water
Baguette = “3 g”

(50 kilos = a little over 100 pounds)

Like I said, slightly detailed, good on ya for hanging in there!