Wheat, Enzymes and Flavor

• Wheat flour contains lots of natural sugars, but ordinarily they're bound up in the form of starchy carbohydrate molecules. When wheat sprouts in the wet spring ground, enzymes in the grain begin converting those starches into sugars to fuel the growing plant. The same enzymes are triggered when you moisten the flour to make bread dough, and -- given time -- will unravel the carbohydrate molecules, releasing those sugars and dramatically improving the flavor of the bread. Professional bakers can refrigerate the bread overnight, letting the enzymes do their work in a slow, low-temperature rise, but time is expensive. Accordingly, bakers in France and elsewhere use other techniques to develop flavors more quickly.

Beans. Seriously.

• One of those techniques is to add bean flour to your bread. Adding beans to improve flavor sounds odd, but it's not the beans' own flavor that counts. The flour of soybeans or fava beans is high in enzymes that act much the same way as the ones in wheat, because those beans -- like the grain -- are designed as nutrient storehouses for a new plant. It takes very little of this bean flour to have an impact. By French law, it's limited to 2 percent of the flour by weight, about the same amount as the yeast. For your home baking, that's a tablespoon or two per batch of bread.

Using the Technique

• Prepare your bread normally, aside from the addition of bean flour, and you'll see a modest improvement in the flavor and color of your loaf. It will have more subtle and complex flavors, and the crust will brown to a deeper hue. The effect increases if you slow the bread's rise, either by starting with cold rather than warm ingredients or by refrigerating it for a few hours. Overnight refrigeration is even better, since, unlike a commercial baker, you have no economic pressure to keep things quick. The longer rise will give your bread a deep, professional flavor and a distinctively rich, red-gold crust when baked.

Some Additional Hints

• If you find it difficult to locate bean flour in your immediate area, look for diastatic malt instead at a health food store, or call artisan bakeries in your area and scrounge. Like the bean flour, it's a potent source of starch-digesting enzymes. Using a starter is another valuable technique, which you can use in conjunction with any of the others. The simplest form of starter is just a piece of bread saved from your previous batch. Incorporate this into your next day's baking -- or freeze it, for a later batch -- and it will infuse your new bread with the deep flavor and color of a well-aged dough.