But, this bread is terrible?
A flour by any other name wouldn't taste as savory
I am in the midst of the five-year anniversary of my baking sourdough bread. This friends, is a momentous occasion.
There’s been half a decade of learning via beautiful loaves and utter, yet still somewhat edible crap.
If you do your napkin math, you’ll note that despite being an early recipient of Original Covid, I wasn’t a pandemic baker, having started just before the shit hit the fan in 2020. Oh how time flies when corporeal languishing occupies the majority of your days, right?
My bread quest started less as a point of boredom and/or curiosity and more a point of necessity given that while Spain has bread, it doesn’t have good bread.
I’ve seen more than one misinformed food/travel “writer” parachute into the country on a sponsored press trip and infer that Spain is a serious gastronomic destination because they have bread in the gas stations! How serious is that! Bread! At the gas stations! And yes, exclamation points are always in fine writing!
There is no question that Spain is most definitely a gastronomic destination, but it’s most definitely not due to the pan de gasolinera. That offer is, to put it mildly, horrible. Of course, when taking a broad view of the country, the bread in most restaurants, is also kind of horrible. In fact, the bread in easily 95% of the bakeries (Galicia excepted), is horrible too. It’s all part of what has become the Gas Station Industrial Bread Complex as despite bread being a definitive stable of the Spanish diet, something was lost along the way.
Roll back the pages of history far enough and there was good bread in Spain, although in no way did I ever get to know those golden days. The problem was that people started driving and avoiding the centers of towns. At the same time, thanks to the ever-dwindling Spanish salaries they didn’t want to pay a just amount for bread (after all, it’s a simple, daily staple) yet have it with every single meal. Even if you go for Chinese food in Spain, it comes with a serving of rice and bread.
Now Repsol, the largest gas station chain in Spain with 3,300 stations, sells 14 million barras (baguettes) a year which is more than all of the 15,000 bakeries in the country put together.
“It’s bread Jaime, but not as we know it.”
These gas station breads are a “mostly” flour-based substance that may look like a proper bread, but that’s where the similarity stops. They’re loaves that are industrially pre-made offsite, brought in frozen, and then “baked” at the gas stations. I’m sure the interview process for potential attendants is something like, “Can you use a register and pull a crusty bread-esque substance out of an oven a couple of times a day?”
The scalability and money from this industry is impressive but it’s come at the cost of having no flavor and going hard/stale the same day you pick it up. Thus, why it’s soooo convenient to be able to pick up more at the gas station. And yes, people in Spain now go to gas stations just to pick up bread, accelerating the closure of local bakeries which honestly, are mostly doing the same thing as the gas stations, making nobody the winner in this game.
From the moment I moved to Spain, I fought eating this bread-like substance as I love actual bread. A proper human don’t buy no bread in no gas station. I’d also been spoiled for the last 15 years previous as San Francisco sourdough rumors are true and the city as well as the surrounding towns have excellent bread.
Upon arriving to Barcelona I was aglow with the fact that it is not wanton for proper bread as is the case in most of Spain. These are the bakeries using the correct method of a sourdough starter or masa madre/massa mare as it’s known in Spanish/Catalan.
Living in the Born neighborhood allowed ready access to the Baluard bakery in nearby Barceloneta. Founder, Anna Bellsolà started by doing everything properly, using a sourdough starter to make the breads (albeit with malt as a nutrient boost). I do however fear for the future as investment firm Carpathia bought 50% of the bakery in 2023.
The only real problem with Baluard is that their most popular bread, the “Barceloneta” is just a regular sourdough loaf that’s priced a bit silly. That and they never seem to time the baking right as no matter when I went, it was always too soft to be sliced. Ah yes, everyone has their bread sliced in Spain when they buy it, a practice that I stopped long ago as it dries out the bread too fast and honestly, cutting slices off the loaf as you eat it (instead of when you buy it) is the best thing since they invented sliced bread.
There’s also another great bakery called Triticum, but I could never really find an easy way to buy their breads although they’re a notch higher than Baluard. Then there’s Turris, that now has locations all over Barcelona, as well as a few others such as Forn Mistral or the long-closed, Barcelona Reykjavik which are/were quite decent but not worth the hassle over other general breads.
As of late, a number of good hipster bakeries (such as Pa de Kilo or Oz bakery) have sprung up advertising their ‘massa mare!’ creds boldly but with prices to go with the accompanying hipster-osity ( 8-9€/kg on up for basic loaves) and often with a heavy focus on healthy and/or rare grains as well as other inconveniences such as being only open in the mornings, requiring pre-ordering the bread or being owned by a French couple who put the ‘quoi?’ in ‘service’.
Ah yes, beware the small chain of bakeries in Barcelona called, ‘Massamare’ as their bread is anything but. There is no Trans Sourdough Authority to regulate these things unfortunately.
Overall, this is probably a bubble destined for popping as while the gas station bread is too cheap, these are too expensive, unless of course they’re more of a bread gallery and only intend to sell five loaves a day before going off to sell ‘crushable’ natural wines at the shop on the other side of the street. Who knows, maybe some of it gets sold to the rare restaurant that cares about upping their bread game and the bakery actually is a “concept store” front.
I moved out of Barcelona after it bled me dry monetarily along with the tourists arriving and then having the nerve not to leave during the low seasons. But whenever I went into the city from the village, at the end of a day in civilization, I’d stop by Baluard and pick up 5kgs or so of bread to bring home and freeze. In case you didn’t know, bread freezes quite well if you’ve a manner to properly toast it afterwards.
This, to put it mildly, was a massive pain in the ass, especially as I was going by train and the freezer should be for other things like having ice cubes always at the ready for Gin & Tonics, freezing your sour cream culture, or storing the wild boar you killed and butchered two years ago… or would have done had the thought not terrified you.
But, this is how it went and I tried to find other fine-bread retailers nearby my village of habitation. They do exist, such as Forn de Nulles outside of Tarragona or then in Lleida, the ridiculously-named, PaPanBread. These are all good and very reliable but can’t hold a candle to la Puntual in Girona or MésKPa in Torelló to the north of Vic. The latter is the highest there is in terms of nearby bread excellence, unless of course one is willing to drive up to Montpellier in France and stop by Pain Brut which is what happens when bread stops being flour and gets downright sexual.
Hyperlocally, there was a bakery that started in the Priorat village of Capçanes simply called, ‘Pa!’. The problems with it were that they were only open three days a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday), you had to order the bread beforehand and most importantly, it was more expensive than the offer at the gas station.
And this is the issue with many local bakeries in that they definitely have the ability to make good bread from a sourdough starter, but they often can’t be bothered to keep it up. This is shown no better than with the Reus bakery, Sistaré where the owner does sourdough whenever he feels like it and the other days, it’s the much more bland affair of bread made via commercial yeasts and basic flours. At least there they actually make the bread and it doesn’t roll in as pre-made, frozen dough.
As I went to Barcelona less and less, I tried limping along with buying the pa de pagès (peasant loaf) at Carrefour. One would think, “Oh, it’s French. Oh it’s a traditional bread. Oh, that must work?”
While not horrible, it is much more industrial and, much like a hookup from the bar at last call, it will most likely let you down a great deal when you wake up in the morning and wonder, “Dear lord, what have I done?”
So for my own sanity, five years ago, the time had arrived to try making my own bread.
To make your own bread isn’t that hard actually.
To make you own good bread, is something different.
The internet will not be your friend when trying to learn this process on your own as you’ll see massive amounts of contradictory information out there. Photos won’t help and neither will the Bread Bros on TikTok/Youtube/etc. who have, “Five tried and true methods for the ultimate loaf.” Honestly, I can’t really imagine how someone could start out baking bread from scratch these days as the internet is a lake of follies waiting to swallow you whole.
If you’re reading this and are getting the itch to bake, my suggestion is to start with the New York Times sourdough recipe (they have a good video as well) which is an adaptation of Chad Robertson’s Tartine book, which is all about sourdough in San Francisco so obviously it’s good. It’s as simple as it can possibly be, but if reading that recipe leaves you a bit cold, then go friend dating until you find someone who is happy to bake it for you instead. Also, move to a city with a proper bakery because… good cities are the ones with good bread?
I am not like a certain family member who, when trying a new recipe, immediately junks what it says to try what “feels better”, ending up with very strange salads that have raw broccoli in them or salad dressings with a multitude of ingredients. For the record, salad dressings are like cocktails and pizzas: if you can’t make one amazing with three or four ingredients, you’re doing something horribly wrong.
So, there was no mucking about and I started with, rightly, a starter, which I have never and will never give a name to. That’s just silly even though it continues as the same starter, to this day, five years on.
Once I was “with starter”, I then followed the sourdough method to the letter and the results were, well, fine. Guests I had at the time from Ukraine were surprised it turned out as well as it did, but it sure didn’t look like the photos I saw online, but as to which are the “right” photos is a topic up for discussion. In this age of social media, the need to look like the perfect “bread” seems to be more important than anything, even taste. But that’s what was most important with these first loaves in that they tasted like good bread and this, friends, is a core tenet when setting out on this fermented journey.
As a general rule of thumb, if you’ve followed the NYT recipe and aren’t savoring another piece immediately after, your ‘bulk fermentation’ time is too short as the bread hasn’t developed its ‘delicious bits’ which is a technical term I just made up.
I was however very encouraged by the results and as this was still fall of 2019, not March of 2020, I had a trip planned up to Montpellier, France for a work event. I was of a mind that French flour must be the best as French bread is the best and I should buy more flour up there and flourish as a baker.
As I mentioned previously, bread is a very serious affair and thus I looked up serious flour mills around Montpellier. There weren’t that many, but the clear decision was Moulin de Sauret - ‘Creator of Flours’. Not only had they been in milling flour business since 1146, but they had a number of pre-mix flours with an optimal grain balance which are perfect for someone only starting to learn about the madness of various milling regimes and ancient grains.
Upon arriving and choosing my flours, I was informed they only allow payment in cash as France still lives in a 1950s vibe although thankfully not as much as the Germans who will block entire highways when they always drive straight into the non-cash tollgates and refuse to use cards. I think the mill also allowed payment by check as an option, but card, non merci monsieur. I went to a machine to get cash, returned and became the proud owner of 75kg of flour.
It seemed an overkill amount at the time as I was still learning how to bake bread and the results were, “variable” but then March of 2020 hit, everyone suddenly decided they were going to bake sourdough bread, and flour couldn’t be found anywhere. Anywhere except in the kitchen of someone who though it was “overkill” when bought five months previous.
And the show went on as we cruised through various forms of lockdown. Given the lackluster state of bread in Spain, even my less-than-amazing loaves could still be pawned off on bread-desperate friends. Looking back, it may have just been that they were wanting human contact and accepted the trial loaves as a cost.
The baking improved gradually although sometimes it went to the dogs if it was really off. They aren’t terribly picky as they’ll eat animal turds they find out on walks and the larger, ‘Horse Dog’ (as opposed to the smaller, ‘Rat Dog’) has the uncanny ability to find abandoned loaves literally everywhere, including pita breads, or full sandwiches.
Beyond following a clear recipe initially, the key to bread is patience and knowing that it needs to sit a long time, not be overworked, and then baked blazing hot, but with a good deal of vapor in the oven.
Don’t add things in like olive oil or nuts or then muck about with “strange” grains until you have a lot of experience under your belt and understand the process. Those older grains are indeed healthier for us and people with gluten intolerance can usually eat a great many of them, but they really don’t behave like standard wheat, so you gotta know what you’re doing.
Five years on, what I’ve ultimately learned is that no matter how ugly or supposedly imperfect a loaf may come out, you have to always ponder its bread-ness by closing Instagram as well as your eyes and think, “Do I want another slice?” and if you do, that bread is not only not terrible, but a brilliant success.