Flemish Desem Dough Duties

It all started when George, a fellow sailor and friend, gave me The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking. As I love eating bread, I was super excited to have the book and immediately took it back to my boat to read it. I was into the book about 40 pages on the basics of breadmaking before it even gave a recipe for “simple” yeast dough that they felt appropriate for beginners—with another 20 pages on how to make it! I had no idea of all the subtleties of breadmaking and how serious it is. I was easily discouraged and set the book aside. I wasn’t going to start my breadmaking journey on the boat anyway.

Now that we are back at our homestead cabin, I pulled the book out again. I decided to skip the learning experience of the simple recipe and chose a bread that appealed to me: Flemish Desem Bread. Desem (pronounced day-sum), a traditional hearth bread, is made of only three ingredients: wheat, water, and salt. First you make the starter, and once it is mature you use some of the starter to bake with and keep some of the starter for future bakings—somewhat like a sourdough bread. Seemed simple enough. Of course it was and still is a lot more work than I anticipated. The first week I had to “feed” the dough daily which included cutting away the hard crust on the dough ball which was stored in a bucket of flour in our dug out cellar a small hike up the hill, which most closely met the temperature requirements for the starter. After the first week they recommended that you bake bread so that you can appreciate the changes as the desem matures.

First baking: While the flavor was really good, it looked a bit like a flattened our cow patty with the density of a hockey puck. Not to be wasteful, we ate some of the bread soaked in soup and some I cut up and dried to make stuffing. In spite of my time saving short cut of buying wheat flour as apposed to grinding my own wheat berries (where do you buy wheat berries?), I was beginning to think that this may be more work that it is worth. But I decided I would give it another week—after all the dough would not be “mature” for another week. (Sorry, no picture of first bread)

Week 2 was less work, as Daisy (we named my dough ball, as we felt that anything that took this much time, care, and commitment really should have a name). Daisy no longer needed to be stored in a bucket of flour, so I didn’t have to cut away a crust each day. I still had the hike up the hill to get her and put her away each day, but I was becoming more efficient in my kneading and feeding routine.

Second baking: Success! Still a great flavor, and this time the dough rose up nicely and was less dense than before. Can’t wait for future bakings to see how the starter maintains and matures. Daisy is now a part of our family now because I still have to feed her at least twice a week. I didn’t think through the commitment and work of my desem when I chose it, but I think that Jim and I will enjoy the fresh baked whole-grain bread enough to make it worth my time.