Yesterday, I baked a Rustic Sourdough boule from scratch, and it turned out awesome! Baking it in our new Dutch oven trapped the steam and mimicked the condition of a real bakery oven, giving it that awesome crust; slashing the dough a couple of times relieves the tension in the loaf as it rises, and gives it that characteristic bakery "look". I'm super proud of myself, I'm not going to lie. This shit is delicious.
The inspiration for baking my first loaf of real bread was Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. I can't remember the last time I read a book with such avidity, or dog-eared so many passages to read out loud to Sean. The book's premise is that cooking, perhaps more than any other human trait, sets us apart from the animals (as opposed to altruism, humor, grief, etc., all of which have been observed in animals). Pollan demonstrates how "little dramas of transformation" made possible by cooking, in all its elemental forms (his chapters focus on roasting for fire, braising for water, baking for air, and fermenting for earth), proved equally transformative for us as a species, allowing us to quite literally create things that are more than the sum of their parts, whether it's delicious and energy-rich bread from the inedible wheat seed, or a tangy cheese resulting from the furious activity of bacteria and yeast.
Pollan makes a fantastic point about the value of getting back in the kitchen, the space that women, especially, have been trying really hard to get out of: reclaiming our independence from the corporations who have eagerly stepped in and offered to take the work off our hands, to our serious nutritional and environmental disadvantage. He calls his book "an invitation to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and consumption in your life. The regular exercise of these simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations. Not just our money but our powre flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves. And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves."
As I wrote in a previous entry, this year has marked a serious shift in our attitude toward food. We're cooking more of it, and it's more based on fresh ingredients than it ever has been before. This goes along with our increasing efforts to rely less on processed food, and even home products that are full of chemical crap. Yesterday, in fact, I made a revamped version of my laundry detergent, as well as a new all-purpose cleaner--part of the never-ending hunt for one that won't leave streaks on the dark countertops. I'll also be making my own hand soap, as soon as I can lay hands on some vegetable glycerine.
Pollan's writing is always engaging, but this is even more of a personal book than his others, recording his efforts to master the various "elements": working alongside pit masters in a South Carolina whole-pig barbecue, spending Sundays with a chef trained at Chez Panisse learning the mysteries of the mire-poix and the long, slow braise; helping Sister Noella, a nun with a Ph.D. in microbiology, make stinky French cheese at a Connecticut abbey; or trying to create the famous breads from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco. I learned so many fucking things from this book. Among them:
The inspiration for baking my first loaf of real bread was Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. I can't remember the last time I read a book with such avidity, or dog-eared so many passages to read out loud to Sean. The book's premise is that cooking, perhaps more than any other human trait, sets us apart from the animals (as opposed to altruism, humor, grief, etc., all of which have been observed in animals). Pollan demonstrates how "little dramas of transformation" made possible by cooking, in all its elemental forms (his chapters focus on roasting for fire, braising for water, baking for air, and fermenting for earth), proved equally transformative for us as a species, allowing us to quite literally create things that are more than the sum of their parts, whether it's delicious and energy-rich bread from the inedible wheat seed, or a tangy cheese resulting from the furious activity of bacteria and yeast.
Pollan makes a fantastic point about the value of getting back in the kitchen, the space that women, especially, have been trying really hard to get out of: reclaiming our independence from the corporations who have eagerly stepped in and offered to take the work off our hands, to our serious nutritional and environmental disadvantage. He calls his book "an invitation to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and consumption in your life. The regular exercise of these simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations. Not just our money but our powre flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves. And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves."
As I wrote in a previous entry, this year has marked a serious shift in our attitude toward food. We're cooking more of it, and it's more based on fresh ingredients than it ever has been before. This goes along with our increasing efforts to rely less on processed food, and even home products that are full of chemical crap. Yesterday, in fact, I made a revamped version of my laundry detergent, as well as a new all-purpose cleaner--part of the never-ending hunt for one that won't leave streaks on the dark countertops. I'll also be making my own hand soap, as soon as I can lay hands on some vegetable glycerine.
Pollan's writing is always engaging, but this is even more of a personal book than his others, recording his efforts to master the various "elements": working alongside pit masters in a South Carolina whole-pig barbecue, spending Sundays with a chef trained at Chez Panisse learning the mysteries of the mire-poix and the long, slow braise; helping Sister Noella, a nun with a Ph.D. in microbiology, make stinky French cheese at a Connecticut abbey; or trying to create the famous breads from the Tartine bakery in San Francisco. I learned so many fucking things from this book. Among them:
- in addition to the flavor impacts of earth and water, the invisible ecosystems of fungi and bacteria contribute their own terroir to foods
- bacteria can trade DNA with one another! Japanese people have gut bacteria that's better able to break down seaweed--DNA that originally came from a bacteria species that lived on seaweed itself
- nearly one-third of all foods we eat (and drink) are products of fermentation--rotting.
- fermentation is decomposition is death, lending layers to the mystery and near-taboo associated with the very bodily-ness of foods like stinky cheese
- according to Levi-Strauss, when American troops landed in Normany in 1944 they destroyed several Camambert dairies, because they believed the pungent odor to be corpses
- Fermented foods tend to be acquired tastes, and the beloved food of one culture (rotted shark in Iceland, kimchi in Korea) is often repulsive to outsiders, and thus can serve to create and maintain group identity. (As Pollan puts it, "We are the ones who eat rotted shark.")
One of the most fascinating themes was that humans, the most extraordinarily adaptive species, tend to get ourselves into trouble because we overdo it. We process something, whether be cooking it, fermenting it, etc., to make it better than it was, both in terms of taste and nutrition. But then we keep messing with it, until we've over-processed it into something that's not nutritious at all. Bread is a great example of this. Pollan visits niche bakeries like Tartine and interviews old-school breadmakers, but he also visits a Wonderbread factory. He points out, for example, that the long fermentation of sourdough partially breaks down gluten, making it easier to digest. Mass-produced bread, however, isn't allowed to ferment for long, and thus there's more gluten in modern bread than there has ever been in bread up until this age of processed, shelf-stable foods. A potentially simple answer to the question of rising gluten intolerance--it's not that we're eating anything humans haven't eaten for centuries, it's that the very nature and identity of that foodstuff has been chemically altered and adulterated (hearing about the additives dumped into Wonderbread by the sackful to affect this or that characteristic was frankly appalling) until it's a pale ghost of its former self.
Of the four elements, fire interested me least, since I'm not that into BBQ, and certainly not planning to roast a pig in a fire pit on my lawn (as Pollan eventually does). Braising was certainly interesting, but that's a skill I feel comfortable with, especially with my recent run of soups. I did learn that onions form the backbone of braises, soups, and stews all over the world, whether it's the mire-poix in France (onions, carrots, celery) or soffritto in Italy (onions, garlic, celery), and that rather than sauteeing the aromatics, you can achieve much better overall flavor by sweating them inside--cooking them over very low heat for a much longer period of time, without browning them. Still, those are variations on things I'm already somewhat familiar with. It was the chapters on baking and fermenting that were fairly revelatory, and since I'm not going to brew my own mead or make my own cheese (though I might try pickling in the summer), baking bread seemed like the most promising avenue.
We retired our unreliable bread machine, as I think I mentioned, because we couldn't stop eating the bread. So this was already a bit of a dangerous proposition (and true to form, most of that boule is gone!), but I couldn't resist; after reading Pollan, bread machine baking seemed completely lame. Rather than use a "wild" starter, which would take weeks, I bought a starter from King Arthur. Unfortunately, I don't think we fed it in time, since we were away, and then lacked filtered water (chlorinated water can kill the yeast), so it wasn't as frothy and bubbly as I think it should have been. But after a few days, it still turned out a damned fine loaf of bread, so, win! For the aforementioned reason of danger, of course, home-baked bread is unlikely to earn a regular place in our house. The exception would be multigrain bread for sandwiches, but as I learned from Pollan, the chief difficulty in creating an edible whole grain loaf is that you're fighting a losing battle with gravity. White flour is light and rises easily; whole grains are the equivalent of lead.
I really enjoyed making bread, too, which was something Pollan point out--we can find pleasure in something that used to feel like a chore we'd rather outsource. It feels good to develop a skill, to create, to be able to look at a golden, crusty loaf and think "I made that happen." Also, shaping dough is fun!
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