Wonder Bread

Is there a Nobel Prize for baking? If not, why not? Splitting the atom was nice, but you can't eat it.

Since there probably isn’t a Nobel Prize for food, I nominate Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street bakery for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Also for the Nobel Peace Prize, which seems to go to whoever has most improved human existence in some tangible way. Move over Al Gore. This man is a hero and a national treasure.

In case you’ve been preoccupied with electioneering matters for the last two years, Jim Lahey is the guy who invented the famous no-knead slow-rise bread that has swept the globe. The recipe first came out in the New York Times two years ago. It has since been featured in Vogue and been re-printed in the food sections of most decent newspapers. It is on U-tube. It is easy as pie (way easier actually) and freakishly delicious. The original New York Times article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html.

Everyone knows that gluten is what makes good bread good. Gluten gives bread chewiness and texture and makes those big holes in the crumb possible. Conventional bread baking develops gluten mechanically, by kneading. Mr. Lahey figured out that you can skip the kneading and develop gluten chemically by letting the bread rise slowly, slowly for about 12-18 hours. I say “chemically” in the breeziest possible meaning of that word. The gluten molecule lengthens and strengthens and complicates itself in some marvelous way if you just leave it alone to rise slowly. Mr. Lahey’s recipe calls for just a pinch of yeast to slow the rising. His genius was to get out of the way and let nature do its work.

Then there’s the crust. Mr. Lahey’s dough is very wet. You put this wet, slowly risen dough in a ceramic or cast iron lidded pot pre-heated to about 450 degrees, and the wetness of the dough and the super-hotness of the pot create the crustiest, chewiest crust you ever saw or tasted. I’m sure there’s chemistry to that part too, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that it works. It is not just like the best old world artisan bread, it IS that.

The technique is radical. The product is classical. This bread is what Jesus ate. Make that Moses. It is ancient, basic, staff-of-life stuff. It’s as if someone discovered a simple and significant improvement in the design of the wheel. How surprising. How wonderful. It lights up the world a little bit.

(Photo credit, Todd Anderson; baking credit, Annie Anderson.)

New & Improved (NOT!)

Remember the early Quisinart food processors? You could push a whole (small) russet potato through the feed tube and get thin, perfect rounds. You could also julienne your whole forearm. Those were the days. Now they’ve added so many safety features that the machine is useless for slicing and dicing. You pretty much have to julienne the carrot in advance just to fit it in the feed tube.

On the other hand, the safety features are so intense (you cannot turn the thing on until you’ve locked it down like a safe) that once I’ve got it set up, I let Enzo pretty much do what he wants with it. What he wants is to turn it on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off. Ooooooooon. Off! Ooooooooooooooooooooon. Off! He likes the pulse feature.

But the best cooking tools haven’t changed. Early Man (or Early Woman) braised mastadon shanks in a Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot. The design hasn’t changed since. I inherited my grandma’s, which we all think of as her bean pot, though she cooked many other things in it. The pot is persimmon colored, nine quart. The handle on the lid is a little melted, and in a few spots the enamel is almost worn through. How many millions of pink beans have simmered in that pot with onion, carrot, celery, and a big ham hock? Those beans are not complicated, but mine never turn out as tasty as hers. Maybe I’m over-complicating them. I can never resist adding coriander or forty cloves of garlic or some other innovation.

Speaking of over-complicating things: new and improved kitchen gadgets. They hold such promise, don’t they? The rocky path will be made smooth, the pits will practically jump out of the cherries, and you’ll conquer the world armed only with a mini-blow torch and a battery-powered vegetable peeler, as seen on Oprah. What a total lie. And yet I just went online to look for absurd and baroque gadgets to use as examples, and I almost bought an herb spinner. It was so adorable!

New cooking gadgets will not make your life easier. They will only clutter up the drawer and make it harder to find the tools you actually use. You don’t need a special gadget for making a perfect helix of citrus rind. You do need a wooden spoon, but you can’t find it because it’s buried under the helix gadget. You don’t need corn zipper, a tomato slicer or a mango pitter. You need a ten-inch chef knife. You don’t need an avocado masher or a fruit muddler. You need a two-year-old with a fork. You don’t need a Crockpot. You need my grandma’s bean pot on the back burner of a 1940’s O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove on low.

That brings me to my stove—that chrome curvaceous beauty. It’s older than I am and far more functional. It’s the opposite of a gadget. It’s more like a tank. When all the pilots are lit, it’s warm to the touch even when you’re not cooking anything. In the wintertime, before we had Enzo, I would toast my toes at the open oven door, as if it were a crackling fireplace. I would read about cooking and sometimes actually cook, and I would drink hot chocolate and be warm.

This winter I want to learn to make good beef stew. Mine never turns out right, I think because instead of browning the meat, I grey it. Maybe if I use grandma’s bean pot the patina of a thousand rich stews will rub off somehow and change my luck. Having that bean pot simmering on the back burner with rich meaty stew scenting the air seems like the definition of safe and warm.

When I launch Enzo into the world, I would like to send him with that bean pot. I hope he knows what to do with it. And I hope it keeps him safe and warm.

Food In Books

Two of my favorite books are Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They’re full of hunger and weather and wonderful food. There seems to be something about being honestly physically hungry that goes with being young. And so nothing gives the feeling of young vital life in a book like food and a lot of it.

In Farmer Boy there’s that scene where mother makes pancakes, and on each pancake she puts butter and brown sugar and then stacks on another and another, and the melted butter and brown sugar drip down the sides. There are great slabs of ham and sausage. There are homemade donuts—simple twists, not those new-fangled circle-shaped kind. And then they have pie.

And in A Moveable Feast there’s that day when he stupidly tries to save money by not eating, and then he walks through the cold Paris streets and ends up having cold beer and potatoes and probably something else, but the part I remember is how he uses the potatoes to soak up the olive oil. And on another day he has oysters, the cheap Portuguese kind, with cold white wine. And what about the eau de vie at Gertrude Stein’s—liqueurs that are the essence or raspberry or pear.

The books I read as a kid are lodged in my mind in a way that feels biological. The trance-like reading of childhood is different from anything else. I read Farmer Boy many times. Our mom read it to us many times. I re-read it recently, and it was still good. I first read A Moveable Feast in college. It was assigned for a class, and I read it right through and then right through all over again. I was nineteen or twenty. Already it was rare for me to fall into a book the way I used to as a kid, and I fell into this one. It was wonderful.

I keep trying to say something about being young and how touching it is to look back on some parts of it. (I’d rather hang myself than actually be young again.) For me reading and eating are two things I did better then than I do now. I did both with true hunger, and I miss that.

I am writing this from memory. I haven’t looked up the food scenes in those books, and I probably got a few things wrong. But the food is what I remember best. In A Moveable Feast there’s such a strong feeling of memory and sadness—nostalgia, I guess. There’s that scene where Hemingway’s older artist friend asks him if food still tastes good. Hemingway says that it does, and you know that for his friend it doesn’t. The food all through the book seems to be remembered with such vividness and also sadness, as if he’s remembering when food still tasted good. It sort of breaks your heart, but in a good way.

Quesadillas

One of my earliest memories is of a quesadilla. I am in the steep sloping back yard of our house in Guatemala. I am playing near a swing and eating a warm corn tortilla filled with cream cheese. That’s all. Nothing happens. I eat the quesadilla.

Another memory from that time: the tortilla lady, who I remember as enormous, but who probably wasn’t, comes to the house with a huge basket of freshly made corn tortillas on her head. The basket comes down. A transaction. My mom gives me one right away, and I eat it, plain, warm and wonderful.

Fast-forward about 37 years…

*


Every other month I get my Fine Cooking magazine in the mail. It resembles my real cooking life about as much as the models in Vogue resemble me, and I adore it.

In my real cooking life I have an outside-the-home job and a toddler, and I make a lot of quesadillas, which I love eating while reading about how to cook a crown roast of pork with Asian ginger glaze or how to braise a pear in marsala, honey and fresh thyme. It brings together my two favorite things, reading and eating, in the closest possible way.

Another advantage to reading about food: it’s highly interruptible. You’re not going to miss some crucial plot turn if you’re reading about how to get the lumps out of gravy. And let's face it, I only get to read for a few minutes at a time before HE needs or wants something. So I make and eat easy food and read about hard food, and it all works out pretty well.

Enzo loves to help in the kitchen, but he has no sense of moderation.
You give him something to stir, and he stirs it onto the counter and
floor and himself, all with great joy. So the trick is to give him
something to do that doesn't involve liquids or sharp knives, and then
cook dinner really fast while he's occupied with his own project.

So I'll give him a butter knife and a cooked whole sweet potato, and he
cuts it up. 'Cuts' is a generous description. 'Hacks' might be more
accurate. There's also a lot of mashing. Sometimes we eat the results.
Sometimes I secretly throw them away.

Meanwhile I'm cooking whatever we're actually going to eat, usually
quesadillas. Cheddar, flour tortillas and butter pretty much do it
for us. But you can branch out: mozzarella, store-bought pesto and a touch of tomato paste = instant pizza. Goat cheese, leftover caramelized onions and halved cherry tomatoes are good in the summer. (I make caramelized onions in the slow cooker, which is the only way you can possibly do it in my circumstances.) Feta, some other meltier cheese, and chopped kalmata olives make a sort of Greek quesadilla, especially if you dip it in yogurt-lemon-garlic-mayo-dill sauce. And of course you can put cooked chicken with pretty much any cheese, and it works.

A few months ago, or maybe years, Fine Cooking actually had an article on quesadillas. The premise of the article was, anything with melted cheese in a tortilla counts, so use your imagination. There was a recipe for four-cheese quesadillas fried in garlic butter and for fontina and mushroom quesadillas fried in parmesan butter. Of course it feels good to have what you’re already doing described officially in a magazine. You feel less a slut when your endless quesadillas get this kind of dignified treatment. You also feel like they stole your ideas, but of course there is no originality in cooking. All recipes are just variations and reminders of good things to eat. (I just looked up the issue, July of 2006, which predates my own quesadilla jag. This means I have been stealing from them, not the other way around.)

Anyway, Enzo and I both really like quesadillas. It’s one of the few things we agree on. When I’m cooking, I sometimes pause for a moment and watch him hacking at his sweet potato with such pure concentration, and I wonder if his first memory will be a food memory. It seems likely. I hope it’s a good one.