Baking Process

Our Baking Process

We use the age-old method of long fermentation for our breads and laminated pastries. This means that after the dough is mixed, it is given a pre-determined time at a controlled temperature to develop flavor and strength. Fermentation coaxes flavor from the wheat. This process can take hours or even days. All of our breads are made with four basic ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast or sourdough starter. To those ingredients we add nuts, raisins, cheese, olives—but never preservatives. The fermentation itself helps to act as a preservative to extend the shelf life a bit. Have you ever noticed how some “freshly baked” loaves you buy at the grocery store are rock hard and stale by nightfall? This is because they use lots of yeast and shorten the fermentation times for quick production time. This results in flavorless bread with a very short (sometimes only hours) shelf life.

The production method itself is more a process than a recipe. Our “recipe’s” or formulas change with time, raw ingredients and to a certain extent the seasons. Our bakery is temperature controlled from the time dough is mixed until it goes into the oven, but seasonal variations such as humidity and what actually happens in the fields with a grain of wheat can throw it all off. This is the true skill of the baker: taking these seasonal changes, and manipulating the raw ingredients to produce the same bread or croissant day after day. We really only have two variables that are truly consistent in our process: time and temperature. We try our best to keep these variables in check always, but they can also be used to our advantage. Warmer dough will ferment faster, and cooler slower, so by knowing this we can further manipulate the fermentation on the dough. Often times, we may slow the final proof on our breads to stage the oven if we get backed up in our production. We can also warm the proofing dough up to push it along if needed.

Ingredients

We use unbleached, untreated conventional all purpose flour for most of our breads. This flour is unique in that, unlike most other white flours, it is processed gently at the mill, keeping most of the nutrients naturally found in flour. Enriched or treated flour needs these nutrients re-introduced in the milling process. We never use “high gluten” or “bread” flour preferring softer all purpose flours. Protein in flour is good, and we need it to allow our breads to rise, but too much can be detrimental. Long fermentation itself creates a tremendous amount of strength in a bread dough. If we were to use a high gluten flour, that strength over time would create dough with the consistency of a rubber band. By the time the dough got to the shaping table, it would be so difficult to work with, we’d end up tearing it, and the final loaf would never have the open hole structure we strive for. Strong flours are best reserved for bagels, or short fermented doughs that rely on other ingredients, natural or artificial, for flavor. We strive for fermentation flavor in all of our breads and laminated pastries, and believe that is what sets us apart. Any of our breads with “stuff” in them such as olives, cheddar cheese or nuts could stand on their own as a good tasting bread.

Our whole wheat flour, rye flour and all of our whole grains are organic. We use whole fresh eggs, high butterfat (83%) butter and all natural ingredients in all of our pastries. We never use mixes or pre-made anything. We have considered switching to 100% organic flour, but we are in the business of producing the best tasting baked products we can, not necessarily organic. Most of the flavor in wheat is in the bran and the germ which is sifted away in the production of white flour. Consequently, most of the flavor in a white bread is through fermentation, and in many ways doesn’t have much to do with the actual raw flour. For that reason, we seek out the best performing, most consistent and stable white flour we can find. Currently, it comes from a mill in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Pre-fermentation

A pre-ferment can be a sourdough starter or a yeasted starter. It is a dough that can be stiff, liquid or anywhere in between. We use 3 different types of pre-ferments: a stiff, whole wheat sourdough, a rye sourdough and a stiff, yeasted Italian style starter called a Biga. All of our breads contain at least one, if not two pre-ferments. The main job of a pre-ferment is to jump start the long fermentation process. It gives a tremendous amount of flavor, texture, strength, shelf life and character to our breads. They behave similarly in all breads, except that the sourdough brings additional acidity to the final loaf because the starter is perpetuated over time.
Our sourdough starters began life on the front shelf of our old Llopis brick oven at our Hope Street store several months before opening the bakery! Keeping a sourdough starter young and healthy, through a series of “builds” or “refreshments,” creates complexity and strength without an overbearing tang in the finished loaf. We work hard to create sourdough bread that is complex in flavor, with a mild tang, but not too much. There is nothing magical about sourdough. It is a living thing. Kept young, and healthy it will produce great tasting bread with mild acidity and give good volume in a finished loaf of bread. This creates a balanced level of bacteria for flavor and natural yeast for fermentation. In contrast, if kept old and not maintained well, it produces very acidic bread, with poor volume. Most very sour bread actually has quite a bit of yeast in it, since the sourdough itself is too over-fermented and unhealthy to raise the final dough. In this case, the balance has gone straight to bacteria, with no leavening power left. We’re going for the exact opposite.

In contrast to the sourdough, which has been kept healthy and active for years, our Biga is created daily by mixing a very small amount of yeast into a stiff mixture of water and flour. This is allowed to ferment for up to 20 hours before being used in our yeasted breads and laminated pastry. By using a yeasted pre-ferment, we are able to cut back the total amount of yeast dramatically, creating a more natural, long fermentation, while creating none of the acidity, or sourness, found in sourdough bread.

Many customers have commented over the years that our bread is not very sour, but has a tremendous amount of flavor. They are always surprised that sourdough bread is not necessarily sour. This is a quality we strive for by keeping our sourdough starters young and healthy. They are always ready to raise the bread and contribute flavor and texture. In fact, many French bakers consider excessively sour bread a defect. We prefer to pull as much flavor out of the wheat, while giving a slight tang that compliments the bread and the other food at the table, rather than overwhelm the palate with what we call “battery acid!”

Laminated Dough

Croissants and Danish are made by a process called lamination. Butter is literally folded into a piece of fermented dough. We start by mixing and fermenting slightly sweet, rich dough. We then begin the process of “folding” butter in. The chilled butter is encased in the dough and repetitively rolled out and folded onto itself until there are many distinct layers of butter and dough. In between folds, the dough is given a chance to rest. When the dough is finally shaped, proofed and put in the oven, steam is created from the many layers of butter trapped in the dough which creates the layers of light flaky pastry that we love. If the pastry is not flaking all over your lap, we either did something wrong, or it’s a humid day! Unlike a lot of croissants or danish on the market, we are not looking to create a sweet, decadent morning pastry. On the contrary, like our breads, we want some fermentation character in the dough. This actually allows us to cut the normal amount of butter back in our croissants from what may be found in others available. This is not to say that a Seven Stars Bakery croissant is healthy. It still contains 1/3 of its volume in butter! After all, that is what a croissant is all about-the butter! While we are using a high quality expensive butter, many bakeries will use “danish roll in fat”. Really. It’s best you don’t ask what that is….

Cookies, Scones, Muffins

From scratch! That’s really what sets us apart. Well, that and the butter! Our scones for example use a lot of that 83% butter! We make things the way they used to be made. Our recipes have a long ingredient list of things you would know. Words like flour, eggs, butter, pure vanilla, nuts (always toasted to bring out all the flavor), chocolate, salt, brown sugar…. We don’t use any ingredients with scientific sounding names that you’ve never heard before. Yes, it’s true, it may not be “healthy”, we will never create a “low fat” line, and we will probably never jump on any of the Atkins type diet fads. That’s just not what we do. However, everything we offer is real, and in moderation can be considered acceptable in a well rounded diet. Every well rounded diet needs the occasional decadent Sticky Bun!