Happy New Year

Wow, it’s been nearly two months since my last entry. In Portland, that translates to some 50 billion gallons of rain water that has fallen on my head. Since my last entry was about bread, and specifically, the “No Knead Bread Recipe,” I’ll start there.

Not too long ago, Cook’s Illustrated came out with an “Almost No Knead Bread Recipe” that was supposed to correct for some of the (admitted) shortcomings of the original. I imagine a lot of people had been working on tweaking that recipe to give it a bit more character. While the crumb and crust can come out nearly perfect, the flavor’s a little… flat.

Check out the Cook’s recipe. They make some good suggestions (specifically, adding vinegar and beer to the mix.) I also recommend replacing some of the water with buttermilk. The trick is getting the hydration right. You need to get the dough wet enough to break down the proteins, but you don’t want to end up with those flat loaves (see my last post) every time. They’re fine for munching, but not great for general purpose bread use.

Well, anyway, I’ve sort of put that method aside for the time being since I’m working through Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”, which is a more traditionalist approach to the topic. It’s a really great book, even if you don’t necessarily agree with his position on shortening v. butter/oil or instant yeast v. fresh.

Here’s a couple of examples I made today:

The half-gone loaf on the right is his multigrain bread. The two on the left are marbled rye (that I made for a New Year’s party to which Jim the Magnificent Meat Man will be bringing his corned beef.) You can see that they came out looking beautiful. The multigrain was so good that my 4-year-old wouldn’t go to bed until he could eat several slices. These were all done with standard yeasted bread methods and baked on a pizza stone in our oven.

Haven’t cracked the rye open yet, but it smells fantastic. I think the only modification that I made was replacing the shortening (yuck) with olive oil. Other than that, I noted that maintaining the moisture levels identical in the dark and light rye was not easy. Ended up using cocoa to color the dark (couldn’t bring myself to use “caramel coloring” as requested in the recipe).

On the garden front, we’re STILL eating Tuscan kale, broccoli, and brussels sprouts from the garden, but it’s a cold, wet, mushy mess out there. Have lots of plans for the summer, including getting the chickens, building a wood-fired bread oven, re-arranging the “farm” into something more aesthetically pleasing, and planting lots and lots of stuff.

Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” right now, and I have to say, it’s practically the same book as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. I mean, I wouldn’t consider it plagiarism, but it’s almost identical in much of its perspective and many of its conclusions. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying it. I am. Still, if you’ve read Pollan’s book, you’ll instantly see what I mean. I don’t know that these two would have much to argue about.

Americans don’t know, or care, much about food. The current state of the American agricultural system is pathetic and crooked. Something has to change, and inevitably will because it can’t be sustained like this. It may be that the only way that it gets changed is by people refusing to participate in the current feedlot, corn syrup, super-sized diabetes machine.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of faith that anything like that will happen until something horrible, more horrible, moves people to change. Americans don’t have a real great recent track record for “doing the right thing.” Generally, we don’t “reduce” anything; we “slow the increase” of things. That doesn’t help. Anything more complicated than announcing that you’re against terrorism as a concept is lost on the general populace.

Both of these books require the reader to change their lives in not always easy ways. If you were brought up on box wine and Big Macs, I have to guess that the leap is pretty great.

I digress. It’s a pretty good book. I especially liked her description of being found on the list of “100 people screwing up America” juxtaposed against her pulling the viscera from a recently decapitated turkey carcass. She’s a bigger man than I for that reason alone.

Happy New Year.