|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
Clear Flour Bread
Clear Flour Bread is easier to find by bike than by car, located in a neighborhood of twisting one-way streets between Harvard Street and Commonwealth Avenue that leave you wondering whether you’re in Brookline or Boston (Answer: Brookline). Still, judging by the line that forms by 8:30 on Saturday mornings you’d think there was a trail of breadcrumbs to their door or, better yet, that they’d arrived like the characters in a cartoon wafted aloft by the sweet scent of something wonderful. Clear Flour broadcasts a comforting smell of sugar, butter and yeast for at least a block in any direction, an aroma that only intensifies after you enter the shop. It was not always so.
27 years has made 178 Thorndike a true food destination In 1982, Christy Timon, a slight spunky force of a woman, rented 178 Thorndike Street in Brookline and started Café Small Caterers. The space had one convection oven, a few burners and cold running water. She worked around the clock and often got behind on sending out bills, but she was successful and busy. She was also, she discovered, a somewhat reluctant caterer. “Food wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I really wanted to bake.” A friend who raised orchids gave her a sourdough starter, and that was all the impetus she needed. She used her catering customers as guinea pigs, slipping her bread into their dinner parties. Soon orders for bread started competing with catering jobs. Sometime in 1983, she bought an enormous eighty-quart mixer from Binky’s donuts and Café Small Caterers metamorphosed into Clear Flour Bakery. There was only one problem: she was working 16-17 hours a day and needed some help.
Christy the creative force and Abe the odd job guy Enter Abe Faber. Abe and Christy first met in art school; he was a studio artist and she studied dance. They reconnected in 1983 when he was working as a carpenter and as a friendly gesture he offered to fix her screen door. He recalls an old carpenter warning him, “You never want to do that for a girl--you’ll end up marrying her.” Too late. “I started as the odd job guy. Then she asked me to be a driver, and then a bookkeeper. My role slowly grew over twenty-six years and we did marry.” Although Abe is a good baker, Christy is still the creative force behind the bread; Abe’s responsible for making sure the trains run on time (and does most of the talking).
In 1990, and then again in 1992, Christy and Abe travelled through France for a month, stopping at small artisan bakeries where they could hang out for a few days, observe and learn. Despite their own weak French and hosts who couldn’t speak English, they encountered a community of patient bakers willing to share their secrets. After each trip they returned to Thorndike Street determined to apply their experience to an American reality. “It wasn’t about coming back and doing what they did,” Abe says. “It was about reverse engineering, figuring out how to get the end product with the ingredients and conditions we have here.”
Pain de mie is rolled, twisted, left to sit a few minutes to de-gas before baking For that they needed an oven, so in 1994 they spent seventy-thousand dollars on an enormous bread oven, and then another fifty-thousand for the concrete cube the city of Brookline required them to build to house it. All the while they remained at 178 Thorndike Street. It’s a tight space for a repertoire as broad as Clear Flour’s, but they’re smart and flexible and move tables and racks around to accommodate the various stages of production in a baker’s day. It occurred to me that these folks were way ahead of their time. Many people would have pushed to grow their business by opening more shops or increasing their volume, but not Christy and Abe. They remained small and focused, extending their reach by increasing their bread repertoire and developing a strong pastry line.
Superstars of the pastry line
The extent of their range makes itself known as soon as visitors pass through the door of the shop. Floor space is cramped, with hardly enough room for five or six customers at a time, a good thing, because visitors can’t help but feel they’re surrounded by wonderful things to eat. Wheeled racks of bakers’ sheets display fruit tarts, tea cakes, morning buns, dried cherry and blueberry scones, brioche, oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies. Depending on the day of the week there may also be once-in-awhile specialties like gibassiers, the citrus-flavored yeast pastry from Provence. Treats like petite tricorned hamentaschen with a poppyseed filling, pumpkin tea cakes and individual hand-decorated holiday sugar cookies in ribboned cellophane make seasonal appearances. Atop the small counter where the Clear Flour staff assembles your purchases, nestled protectively beneath a clear dome, is a plate of my all-time favorite sweet snack, cannalés, grooved confections of yeasted dough each about the size of half a wine cork, with an intense flavor of deeply caramelized sugar.
And then there is the bread, eight-foot tall racks of bread, always filled with at least a dozen different loaves in all shapes, textures, flavors and sizes (my daughter’s favorite is a smiling sun fashioned from traditional baguette dough).
Roxanne's fave Baguettes, batards, boules, ficelles, pan and sandwich loaves, and rolls, made from whole wheat, rye and buckwheat flours. A variety of whole grains, seeds, nuts, fruit and olives figures into some of the bread. Fantastical bread sculptures of dragons and other animals fill one window. Although freshly brewed coffee is available, this is a shop, not a café. You are expected to buy (perhaps sniffing for a moment), then depart. Clear Flour Bread embodies an increasingly rare tradition, an artisanal neighborhood shop.
the BREAD As Christy and Abe have honed their bakers’ knowledge over the years their breads have changed. “We used think that flour was stable, like sugar and salt,” Abe tells us. “It’s not--it’s an agricultural product and each batch is different.” A multitude of factors influences the quality and character of any given grain and the flour it becomes. A good baker knows how to identify those factors and work with them. Bread is made from a simple list of ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast. But making great bread involves a subtle knowledge that is part science and part craft. All bakers know that the flavor of any loaf varies tremendously according to ingredients and how a baker chooses to manipulate time and temperature during the process of fermenting and forming the dough. About half of Clear Flour bread is leavened with a sourdough culture, the other half with a variety of “pre-ferments,” that is, mixtures of flour and water that are allowed to rest for a certain time (say, overnight) before the remaining ingredients are added to make the final dough. Slowing down the fermentation process, which is what causes bread to rise, is part of what makes a naturally fermented loaf taste so much better than a quicker bread made with commercial yeast.
A sampling of Clear Flour's doughs
“You do things over and over a million times and pay attention and I like to think you get better at it,” Abe says. “Our bread has changed. When we first opened it was hard for people to get real baguettes made in the French fashion so we concentrated on that. Now you can get decent—not as good as ours, but decent—baguettes all over the place. So we’ve tried to shift our repertoire a little. We do a lot with rye now and German-style breads (still made with sourdoughs and pre-ferments). I like to think that we changed in the way that winemakers change. When you’re young you’re always going, Wow, boy did I make big wine! Lots of fruit! Lots of alcohol! But eventually you get tired of that style and begin looking closely at more nuanced aspects of wine, like structure and minerality. Our bread is the same. At first, it was us going Hey, taste how sour the sourdough is! Now we’re trying to do something a little more subtle than just hit you over the head with a sour tang.”
Baguettes a la Brookline Christy and Abe’s passion for bread has involved them in the larger world both of bakers and ingredients. “We like being of our neighborhood community,” Christy says, “but we’re also part of a professional community with big players—the big flour guys and big equipment guys.” They have relationships with flour producers and millers, working directly with them both to increase their flour knowledge and to influence the product they receive. “If you know who’s making your flour and your equipment you know who to call in case something needs to be changed for the future,” Abe says. Abe is the Vice Chairman of the Bread Bakers Guild of America and Director of Camp Bread, the once-every-few-years gathering of bakers both amateur and professional for education and cross pollination regarding all things bread.
An American expression of rustic Italian Of the half-dozen exceptional artisan bakeries in the Boston area, Clear Flour Bread is at the top of my list. Their sourdough white breads taste more of France to me than California, with a mild tang that doesn’t overwhelm the bread’s essential wheatiness, and their rye breads, especially the dark rye and the pumpernickel, are a revelation in their interplay of sweet and sour notes, with complex, satisfying flavor that bear no relation to the taste of supermarket breads of the same name. Moreover, Christy’s own culinary orientation is one with which I sympathize: she’s not trying to duplicate the exact loaf of bread you might find in France or Italy as much as say, Okay, I know how it works over their, with French or Italian ingredients. How would the same techniques express themselves with American ingredients? Would a German recognize Clear Flour’s Leinsamenbrot (a rye loaf flavored with flaxseed)? I don’t know. But I do know that I don’t particularly care. It’s good enough to stand on its own merits. Christy showing Jody how to roll a baguette My staff has never been on a Guerilla Grilling outing they didn’t enjoy, but in the days following our visit people kept taking me aside in the kitchen to explain what a great time they’d had, how generous the Clear Flour staff had been with information, how patient everyone had been with our (mostly) clumsy efforts to follow their instructions in how to transform a raw lump of dough into an expertly turned baguette. While we were there, we were all encouraged to dress up in big white baker aprons and baker caps and, as usual, we all laughed at each other. We decided we looked like brain surgeons, or like people who had just had brain surgery.
Surgeons or bakers??? Christy set us up at a table with baguette dough and everyone had a chance to try their hand at shaping a loaf. The loaves baked while we ate various grilled sandwiches on Clear Flour foccaccia. I did note later that our loaves didn’t make it onto the wire racks out front with the loaves intended for customers. Ours were like us, a little funny looking.
Our Guerilla Grilling Spread For real bread that’s not funny looking, check out Clear Flour Bread’s location on Google Maps and make your way to Thorndike Street. Ride a bike if you can. It will help you rationalize all the bread and pastries I guarantee you’ll want to buy.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
