P I C N I C

I just picked up a new bread book. It’s called The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz. I haven’t actually made any bread from it yet but it’s exciting to read. Basically he’s a California baker who goes on several trips to Europe and talks to really interesting bread bakers and describes what they do in a very precise way. The book is very haphazard, it’s really just a big collection of various techniques. He describes the gluten development in pain ordinaire as ‘like soft, damp taffy.’ And the baker who he was with let him ‘touch the dough, he taught me what I couldn’t learn by just looking.’ Sounds sexual. There is lots of discussion as to what good bread is. The baguettes in Paris are apparently no good anymore. ”The bread… the bread is like air,’ one unhappy Frenchman said while waving a piece of crust in front of my face. ‘Years ago every bread was wonderful in Paris. But now they give us air.” Sounds like the bread from the Fred Meyer bakery, except that doesn’t even have a crust. But he then goes on to describe how this supposedly bad bread is made. A wet dough is whipped very fast for 20 minutes to develop lots of gluten. The airiness is made by getting the yeast very active and baking at the right moment, adding salt later in the knead -which would otherwise inhibit gluten development-, adding vitamin C, and lots of other little things. He doesn’t discriminate, he just describes what he sees. It’s a very nice cookbook and I wish there were more like it. A survey of food rather then one cooks idea of food.

The loaves in the photo are the sourdough whole wheat bread. It’s fairly dense but they taste really rich, tart, and nutty.

It’s one thing to beat dough and bake it, but letting it rise in the right way is very difficult. I’ve realized that when one uses a basket as a mold for a loaf the bread is sitting upside down in the basket as the curve of the bottom becomes the upward mound. This distributes the gasses more evenly. The loaves I make tend to be dense on the bottom with large air pockets at the top. So with these little dinner rolls I let them rise right side up for a bit, then I flipped them upside down and let them rise some more, then I flipped them again right side up onto the baking sheet. It seems that making bread, which can only be described as an arcane art, is composed of all sorts of small bits of practical knowledge like this.

With the flour I ground I’m making some sourdough. I’m going to build it up over several days to get a very ripe and tangy flavor.

I made a ham according to Rhulman and Polcyn’s ‘Holiday Ham’ recipe, from their book Charcuterie. I marinated it for 5 days in salt, brown sugar, and pink salt; I hot smoked it with the madrone for 5 hours then baked it for another 90 minutes, until done. It’s smells totally delicious and I even woke up this morning to the smell of ham. At first I thought it was smell memory, but then I realized my clothes were permeated with the thick smoke.

It was really good, the only fault I could point to would be a certain dryness. Indeed, the large ham section weighed 9 pounds 13 ounces after being brined, but after I baked it weighed 6 pounds 12 ounces. That means that 3 pounds of juices and fat has dissapeared, so it’s no wonder it’s a little dry. I thought maybe I should boil it after smoking, but it now occurs to me that I could do a cold smoke followed by a sous vide cooking, but that’s very complex. My father was recently describing some Spanish ham he ate recently. ‘It was like no ham I ever tasted. It was sweet and light and its texture was more like a pate rather than a cut of meat.’ This sounds like a dreamy goal.

This is the second batch of sourdough I’ve made. I’m still amazed that I’ve created the culture myself out of nothing, I didn’t use any added yeast. The scoring is still a mystery for me. The top loaf was scored more then halfway through, but when it rose in the oven the terrace effect I was hoping for instead became flattened. A loaf that stands out in my memory is from Acme bread in San Francisco. All the loaves, in addition to being totally deliscous, were works of art. They were so perfect you felt almost disjointed from normal life. The scoring on those loaves were like deep canyons, and that pulling apart of the bread was really well done. I love this passage from Marcus Aurelius:

This also thou must observe, that whatsoever it is that naturally doth happen to things natural, hath somewhat in itself that is pleasing and delightful: as a great loaf when it is baked, some parts of it cleave as it were, and part asunder, and make the crust of it rugged and unequal, and yet those parts of it, though in some sort it be against the art and intention of baking itself, that they are thus cleft and parted, which should have been and were first made all even and uniform, they become it well nevertheless, and have a certain peculiar property, to stir the appetite.