Where home cooking is always in season! Kitchens are the heart of the house. Please join me as I do some cooking and chat about life in general, usually with an Italian accent!
Mark Bitman, in his NY Times column, hit a nerve with his no-knead bread recipe. He didn’t invent it, but his article motivated a gazillion people to bake bread. All well and good, but somebody please explain why this is better than kneading. • The time element is the same if you use a pre-ferment like a poolish or a biga. (Make a small batch of bread dough, with some sort of yeast; leave it in the fridge overnight). • You get to work out all aggressions on the dough, it’s a great upper body workout and it only takes 10 minutes. You want to eat the bread, so you need to work out at least a little. • You have the satisfaction of feeling the dough go from a flour ball to a lively, living thing. Quicker satisfaction than gardening. • And you cannot compare the mess element. I’ll clean up after a knead, any day. Take a click and compare the flour factor from an enthusiastic Chez Pim as she sings the praises of the no-knead method.
Here is my counter top this morning after kneading.
Which mess would you rather clean up?? So, somebody tell me why this method is so wonderful, and if you say because you get a good crust baking in the Crueset, try a spray bottle squirt in the oven. You get to fool around, make great hissing sounds and you get a terrific crust. (Warning: do not hit the light bulb with the wet spray!) So, somebody, please explain the allure.
Bread is a living thing; the bread dough incorporates the very air where you are. It’s one of the mystical things about bread baking. So here’s the question: this morning’s dough ferment smelled exactly like fruity ripe bananas. Why?? I’m in a loft in Soho, not anwhere near gentle island breezes where bananas grow. What is blowing in the wind today?
And for the passionate bread bakers out there, take a look at this website and forum: Sourdough Companion. These guys are committed to their bread!
Well, the great mountain sour dough experiment has been halted. The starter never activated, it just festered, then molded. Blech! I think there may 2 reasons that it didn't activate: bleached flour and not enough agitation. I'm having trouble finding unbleached bread flour and bleached flour has less natural yeast so that may have inhibited the reactivation. You are also supposed to shake the bejezuz out of the dry starter when you add the water, and I don't think I did that. Oh well. I'll just have to figure out some other bread experiment. Maybe there is a real, physical reason why light crusty bread doesn't exist up here?? No photos of moldy bread starter.....here's how Alta and Snowbird looked yesterday afternoon. Much better to look at!
Right before we left for the mountains, I started a starter. A natural yeast starter is essentially flour and water and a bit of honey or sugar that unleashes the natural yeast and bacteria found in the flour. It takes a few days to get the starter to the point where it is grown and stable enough to use in place of commercial yeast, but it’s certainly worth the time and effort.
Now that we are in a place that doesn’t believe in hard crusty bread, I’m trying to reactivate my starter and see what happens when you bake bread at elevation (we’re at about 8500 ft. here at the base). I’m craving some real bread, so wish me luck.
It’s the day after Christmas, I can’t eat another rich piece of anything and there is a brand new baking stone to be broken in. Pizza party! The dough rose all day, which is a comforting sight on a rainy day. The toppings were set out: tomato sauce, grated parmigiana, gorgonzola, mozzarella, sweet and sour onion confit, roasted garlic and shallots, olive/caper berry/chili powder, smoked adobe chili powder, sautéed wild boar sausage, sliced pears, capers, anchovies. What?? No mushrooms! (Oh, and the lid of the wine box was pressed into service as a peel. And it worked very, very well, thank you very much.)
I was never really a fan of brioche, if they were around, OK, but it was never anything I craved. That is until I finally got around to watching the DVD that came with Bertinet’s book, Crust. It’s a deceptively good CD. It’s not a slick DVD for the MTV/VH1 fast cut crowd; it takes its time and you actually get to see what the dough should look like. Bertinet breaks down the whole process so that you understand what you are going for, and to help you understand how to adapt the recipe for variables like flour strength, or the weather. I watched the brioche segment and that was it, I had to make brioche. They may be very fashionable in the UK, or that is what Bertinet says, but I think its time for a brioche renaissance in the US. With coffee in the morning, and a drop of homemade fig jam, it was a delicious decadence, a treat that is well worth the time, energy and butter.
After walking into yet another empty refrigerator at our little house in the country, I think I can come up with a list of what is essential for restocking, in 2 categories: stuff you need to buy and stuff you need to make. The stuff you buy category: olive oil, coffee, salt, flour, mustard. Most of the vinegars seem to have survived our absence; any of the fragile ones like Verjus I made sure to use up before I left town. The stuff you make category: stock. I’ve got veal demi-glace, chicken and fish stock all ready to go so I’m happy. Although you can certainly buy good quality stock or demi glace, there is something reassuring about making your own, and controlling what goes into it.
Once I had the basics under control, it was back to bread baking. I’ve only worked my way through 3 recipes from the Crust book, and they are all good but I need to keep making them over and over before I will feel as if I own the formula.
The ale crust bread is amazingly good. I achieved the shatter crust on my second try, and got decent holes in the crumb. The basic white French baguette recipe is excellent, and I fooled around making little twists with olives and cheese. Now, these would be excellent in the restaurant’s bread basket. Which led Jeff and I to a discussion on how Italians eat bread. The Italians use bread as palate cleanser and in informal settings as a plate cleanser (the bread swiping technique is known as ‘scarpetta’). The type of bread that I’ve been baking is bread that you eat for the pleasure of eating bread, so would Italians like all these rustic, crunchy breads….I think so! Now, I need to work on my peel technique. A peel is a thin piece of wood that you place the bread on so that you can slide it into the oven and onto the baking stone. I can’t get the bread off in a clean slide, so all my breads are “C” shaped. I can either use the C as my signature shape, or just keep working on my peel slide. OK, I can see it now..on YouTube…the video of me perfecting my peel slide….. Happy Monday!
This summer I baked a lot of bread at the restaurant, I must have made at least a ton of foccacia and a half ton of everything else. Baking bread is soothing and satisfying and makes the kitchen smell great. It’s sort of the flip side to the coolness of molecular gastronomy. But, I have questions about bread baking and an invitation to a free bread class seemed like a pretty painless way to solve some of bread’s mysteries.
So, Tuesday night I was back at the gorgeous new space (seriously, if you need a professional kitchen, a party space or an intense wine tasting room, this is the place. The wine tasting room has individual sinks for washing away that unwanted wine, and light boxes at your seat for viewing the wine color…however, it does make for some strange wine photos!). Richard Bertinet was giving the class; he’s a Frenchman by birth, but apparently British by choice, which leads to a very endearing, but confusing accent. We settled into our seats with a nice glass of wine, a little plate of nibbles and some outstandingly good bread. Richard teaches classes in Bath, England and if his classes on his home turf are as relaxed and as fun as this class was, then as soon as I figure out where/when and how, I want to go to Bath. However, Bath is really a silly name for a city, it’s like it’s missing something…like Bathville, or Bathtown or even Bath Water….something. He’s also have two lovely books about baking bread at home: Dough and Crust.
Back to bread. Richard’s theory about bread kneading is that you don’t knead, you work the bread, and since he likes really wet dough, this is a messy prospect. I gave it a whirl in the class and managed to send the dough over my head onto the top of the cabinets. However, as the man turns out really tasty bread, he may know what he’s doing working that bread. He demonstrated making foccacia, how to cut those damn epi shapes that I CANNOT master, and we happily munched on his bread creations as he generously answered our questions.
Cut to my kitchen: I spent all day Wednesday restocking my kitchen, and along with staples like paper towels and cat food, I bought flour and yeast and salt. (You know the kitchen is really empty when you don’t even have salt.) And then I started the pre-ferments: a beer based ferment and a more classic poolish that I would use for ciabatta style bread. A pre-ferment is a batch of flour, water, yeast, salt (optional) that you let sit and ferment for a few hours or overnight, and then later you use that preferment as an another ingredient for the finished bread. By Thursday evening I had started to pull the finished breads out of the oven. I like the breads, but they aren’t ‘there’ yet, and as Chef Bertinet said, “Practice.” A lot of bread knowledge and expertise only comes from the continual making of the bread, recognizing and reacting to what your fingers are telling you about the dough, teasing the dough to do your bidding. I’m still at the apprentice level, but I’m working the dough! Any my gorgeous new, autographed copy of his book Crust? It is already full of crumbs and flour and I think it’s much better this way.