Big Adventures with Little Foods

BREAD

What comes to mind for you when I say “bread”? Visions of fluffy, flavorless wonderbread spread with peanut butter and jelly? Or, perhaps, does bread and all of its carbohydrates conjure up something forbidden, even evil for you – has the deceased Dr. Atkins truly brainwashed you? Everything in moderation, my friend and, for me at least, when I think of bread and, certainly, when I choose to indulge in bread, it is something dense, flavorful and wonderful – something to be savored and not fluff to be inhaled.

Sure not all breads are meant to be the same. Take brioche, for instance – it is buttery, light and wonderul served warm with butter and jam. But for me this is not “bread” – this is brioche! The same can be said for American-style breads. My own secret guilty diet-breaker? Potato bread, warmed but not toasted, smothered with butter and gobs of Nutella. But enough of that…I speak of real bread.

When I attended the French Culinary Institute, one of the best parts of the day was that everyday leftovers from the artisinal bread kitchen would be sent to us as our late afternoon snack before class began that evening. A little olive oil with a pinch of sea salt and we were in heaven. I miss that more than I can express. Good bread is just so hard to come by – even in some of the fanciest, quality-obsessed grocery stores I am faced with the same fluffy, tasteless dry breads. I miss the crisp crusted sourdough boules that, when broken into, actually smell like sourdough and have a dense, chewy crumb. So, for those of us in areas that lack good bakeries, we have two choices: 1) accept our plight and eat the bread before us or 2) Make our own bread. I opt for #2 and, for those of you who are up for the challenge, I give you a wonderful recipe for sourdough. Yes, it takes a little planning and waiting but you can always save extra bread by freezing it – hey, you can even parbake a couple of the loves by taking them out of the oven 20-25 minutes early and then freezing them. Then, once you need the extra loves, pop them in the oven, finish baking them and you have fresh bread hot out of the oven whenever you need it!:

Sourdough Starter:
Dissolve 1 tablespoon dry yeast and 2 tablespoons honey in 2 cups warm water in a glass, plastic, or crockery bowl. Stir in 2 cups unbleached white flour; cover with a towel and let sit in a warm place for several days, or until foamy and soured. Store in a covered jar in the refrigerator. Warning: Use a bowl big enough to contain what may be a startling degree of expansion.

Sourdough French Bread
Yields 4 small loaves or 14 rolls
6 cups unbleached organic whole grain white flour, divided
1/2 to 1 cup coarse whole-wheat flour
3 teaspoons salt, divided
23/4 cups warm water, divided (at about 100 degrees F)
1 cup Sourdough Starter
1 teaspoon baker’s yeast (if you have trouble finding this, ask your local bakery to sell you some – it generally comes in 1 pound blocks – way too much for the home-baker)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/3 cup cornmeal

Mix a sponge the night before you plan to bake, by combining 3 cups white flour and the whole-wheat flour with 2 teaspoons salt, 2 cups water, and the sourdough starter. Mix. Cover with a towel and let sit for 10 to 18 hours.
The next morning, prepare the final dough by adding another 3 cups of white flour, 3/4 cup warm water, 1 teaspoon salt, and the yeast.
Using a mixer with a dough hook or food processor with a metal blade, mix at low speed for 2 minutes and then at medium speed for 6 minutes. Turn out onto a floured board and knead by hand until the desired consistency is obtained. Add flour as necessary during the mixing. Place the dough into a large bowl that has been coated with olive oil, making sure that the top of the dough is also coated so that it does not become dry. Cover the bowl with a towel, and allow to rise to two or three times the original volume. The speed of the rise can be altered or halted by changing the ambient temperature; the cooler the temperature in the rising area, the slower the rise. The dough can also be placed in the refrigerator to finish rising at a later date.
Punch the dough down briefly. Dump it again onto a floured board. Cut into loaf-sized pieces. You’ll learn to form the loaves or rolls that suit you best. You can bake two small round loaves and about eight rolls, or whatever you like. I place the loaves on an oven sheet sprinkled with cornmeal, cover with a towel, and allow to rise a second time, at least 1 hour.
Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Slash the top of the loaves with a razor or scalpel blade. Place into the preheated oven. Spray every 2 minutes with water until the bread has baked for 10 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 350 degrees F and bake another 15 minutes. Remove the bread from the sheet, and allow to cool on a rack.

Well the blueberry pie was a success – I served it with vanilla ice cream (Brigham’s which is a popular and very tasty locally produced New England ice cream that my parents always have on hand) and I even boiled down some of the blueberry sauces to make a thick sauce to decorate and accompany the dessert.

As we were doing the dishes I told my Mum that she should save the blueberry sauce for ice cream later on. She turned to me and said something that I thought was worth sharing: “Elizabeth, that’s really what distinguishes a good cook – somebody who can identify and make use of what’s on hand, and knowing what’s on hand to make something wonderful versus going out an buying something premade and ordinary.” That was a nice Mum moment for me at least – good, home-grown, common sense thinking.

I despise waste. The funny thing is that some of the best dishes of the world have come from foods that would have otherwise been thrown away. Case in point – Coq au vin (one of the most played-up classic French dishes of all time) came about because a farmer couldn’t figure out what to do with a Rooster who, well, wasn’t doing much roosting anymore – he was old, tired and had lost interest in the lady hens (poor fella). The solution? Take the rooster meat, dump a bottle of wine on it, add some veggies and cook it on low heat for a few hours et voila! Dinner is served! I love the French – at least when it comes to food.

Even in pastry there are great uses for scraps and leftovers:

Making a pie? Have a bunch of extra dough scraps? Freeze them until you want to make a fruit cobbler. When you are ready, just grind them up with a little extra flour, butter, oats, nuts, sugar – whatever you like – and you have a seriously tasty topping.

Have leftover puff pastry dough from the hors d’oeuvres you made for a party? Cut up the scraps into strips, toss them in a cinnamon-sugar mixture and shove a few pieces into each of a few muffin tins – they will puff up, bake off and get all gooey and you’ll have a decadent breakfast cinnamon-sugar pastry bomb! It’s sort of like gorilla bread but with just a hint of class. This was a sensation among my classmates in culinary school – and that’s really saying something considering the number of fancy desserts we were churning out at the time.

I think this is one of the really beautiful things about learning to cook – that you learn to contextualize many uses for a single ingredient or see many meals springing from a single prepared dish. Not wasting, planning ahead and using what we have available to us generally means we waste less and eat better. And what’s not to like about that?

My fiance informs me that, at some point, I have to stop thinking of this as my first great novel and just start writing. So here it is! Disappointed? Me too – especially as an English major – but there it is. I’m clearing the cobwebs, hammering through the writer’s block and, tommorrow, I promise that I will do better.

Oh, by the way, this really is all about the food.

What I made today – Pie crust (pate brisee) for a blueberry pie tommorrow night for a small dinner party. My mum asked me to make something and I just love a good blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream. No pastry chef I know would insist that they go home and constuct a bunch of fancy desserts in their own kitchen with dehydrated mango, brown sugar foam and hazelnut tuille. No way – the simple things, when done right, are always the best. So I guess you could say that I am going back to the beginning – the base crust – and very likely the mother, or, at least, one of the mothers of French pastry. Somehow, that just seems beautifully appropriate for my very first scribblings.

My secret for a good crust? Not really much of a secret – really cold, basically frozen butter, a combination of cake flour and all-purpose to ensure both tenderness and structure and freezing cold water. Here’s the recipe:

2 2/3 sticks unsalted butter cut into small 1/2-inch cubes and frozen (Plugra/European Style is best)
1 1/3 cups AP flour
1 1/3 cups cake flour
Pinch of salt
1 tsp granulated sugar
4 tbsp. ice water

Combine butter, flour, and salt in food processor (you can also do this in a large bowl with a pastry cutter) and process (pulse) until butter is pea-size. With blade turning, add water, one tablespoon at a time, until the dough holds together. If need be, using the palm of your hand, smear the dough to bring it together (in fancy-pants French Pastry Chef lingo this is called “fraisage”…but I just love the word schmear – even if it does generally refer to some sort of cream cheese concoction). Divide dough into two equal disks, wrap in plastic, and allow to rest in refrigerator for at least one hour.