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One of the nice things about having my in-laws here for two weeks was that it gave me an excuse to bake bread again. So far I’d baked only about three dozen loaves (or equivalent) this year, much less than previous years due to time constraints as well as a recent focus on healthier eating.

Like me, though, my in-laws are bread lovers, and I’m a sucker for an audience. I fired up the oven six times in two weeks:

• What the Dutch Regale bakery calls Korn Bread is more traditionally called Vollkornbrot, at least by people who can pronounce “Vollkornbrot” (e.g. not me). It is a dense, chewy, moist brick of a bread, baked — gasp! — in a pan, a real change of pace for a hearth-bread addict. Made with 100% rye (whole, cracked, and flour), it’s the heaviest bread I’ve ever made, and one I’m not particularly fond of, although area Germans (and my wife’s volks) tell me it’s excellent. The recipe is from Artisan Baking Across America.
• “Team America Beer Bread,” a recipe developed by Craig Ponsford of Artisan Bakers for the Coupe du Monde, scaled down to home-kitchen capacities by Peter Reinhart, and published in Crust & Crumb, is unusual in that in requires two preferments (one sourdough, one commercially yeasted), a bottle of beer, and a large amount of malt. The finished multigrain loaves have a complex flavor and an unexpected (but pleasant) hoppy and malty aroma. I made an extra loaf for the neighbors, but we ate that one too.
• For a party, I made three pans (~6.5 lbs) of focaccia, using the Crust & Crumb formula. Given minimal handling, and baked at the party, the bread was among the best I’ve made. The toppings were a bit less hearty than I prefer, due entirely to the fact that I was too lazy to assemble anything worthy of this amazing dough.
• Next up was a large sourdough boule, my “house bread,” based on a firm levain approach from Artisan Baking Across America. I add a half-cup of flax meal to the dough, something I have not seen done at any commercial bakery. The flax adds density, but tenderizes the dough (probably due to the high oil content). The resulting color and flavor are great.
• Experimenting with potato dough, I created a large “tortano,” which is a rustic Italian bread that looks like a bagel about 14'' across. The bread is built from a poolish starter, but calls for no additional yeast in the dough… so proofing takes a long time, even with this relatively wet dough. The result is similar to a ciabatta, in that the crumb has large, irregular holes. Overall, though, it was not a memorable loaf, probably my least appealing bread of this period. I thought the potato starch would have a more pronounced effect on the crumb, but I was sadly disappointed, and now I have a half tortano in my freezer that I’ll have to schlep off on some unsuspecting future dinner guests.
• Finally, as a farewell party for the in-laws, we hosted a pizza feast. I used Peter Reinhart’s magical delayed-fermentation dough recipe, from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, with wonderful results. This dough shapes like a dream. It’s unbelievable; a few quick tugs and a ball of dough becomes a well-formed pizza shell. To my dismay, I realized too late that my oven technique is a bit rusty… I over-baked some of the pizzas slightly, although I don’t think anyone noticed. A few of the crusts had dried out in the oven. Perhaps the guests were distracted by our fantabulous toppings: roasted garlic, mostly-fresh Roma tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella; homemade pesto and sauteed crimini mushrooms; homemade barbecue sauce, sauteed brined chicken, red onions, cilantro, monterey jack.

So, a million calories later, I’m reduced once again to only occasionally getting my carb fix from bread. Just in time, too — if my father-in-law had had any more vacation time, I’d have ended up looking like the Pillsbury Dough-Boy. Heck, I’ve already got the coloration, the big eyes, and the stupid hat.

Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe, subtitled “Recipes and Stories from Brother Juniper’s Cafe,” is not exactly a cookbook, although many great recipes are included.

Part cookbook and part confessional, Sacramental Magic is a highly entertaining showcase of Peter Reinhart’s passion for great food and great writing. As if in a personal journal, Reinhart recounts the time he dropped a glass measuring cup into the mixing bowl while making cookies, to have the glass explode, and the mixer insouciantly churn the shards into the batter, along with the chocolate chips.

His quest for the world’s best barbecue sauce is equally amusing. And although he can’t publish the final formula (which is the recipe for the commercially-sold “Holy Smoke” bottled sauce), the recipe he provides is great.

In addition to the essays and cafe-tested recipes, Sacramental Magic contains some useful practical information, such as four ways to roast garlic, and a “secret sauce” blend to add zest to sandwiches.

The book seems to be out of print, but if you can find a copy, you’ll enjoy it. We rely on two of the recipes:

1. Caesar Salad (p. 36)
2. Red Barbecue Sauce (a Holy Smoke variant) (p. 137)

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)

Peter Reinhart has been my bread guru for several years; Crust & Crumb taught me a lot about baking, and contains unparalleled formulas for focaccia and sourdough bagels, two of my staples. So, getting his new book was a no-brainer… even before it won the Best Book of the Year award (2002) from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

The Bread Baker’s Apprentice opens with a 50-page, 12-step analysis of the process of bread-baking. This is comprehensive without being overwhelming, and I think beginning as well as advanced bakers will learn from the explanations. Part of the appeal of Reinhart’s writing, for me, is his understanding and presentation of the science behind the process: for example, why slow fermentation creates better flavor. Many people fear baking as if it were an unknowable, mysterious art; in fact, as Reinhart demonstrates, baking world-class bread is as easy as mastering a few basic chemical reactions in one’s own kitchen.

The book contains over 40 basic “formulas,” covering a huge part of the bread spectrum: from baguettes to sticky buns, english muffins to lavash crackers, with regional favorites like Anadama and ethnic favorites like panettone as well. Included are recipes for several sweet, dessert-y things such as stollen, artos, and “celebration” breads.

Of the 40+ formulas, these are the ones I make regularly:

1. A semolina bread Reinhart calls Pane Siciliano (p. 198). Shaped into a pudgy ‘S’, topped with black sesame seeds, and baked to blistery perfection, a loaf of Pane Siciliano makes a beautiful statement.
2. Ciabatta, an Italian flatbread characterized by huge holes in the crumb and a floured, rustic exterior… perfect for dipping into olive oil and balsamic vinegar (p. 139).
3. Pizza (p. 207)… about which much more has been written elsewhere.

Apprentice also contains a revolutionary new approach to fermentation, called Pain a l’Ancienne. This is one of the few innovative ideas I’ve seen in any bread book, and it is remarkable. Reinhart uses this approach in his new formula for pizza dough; the results are nothing short of spectacular. I’ve been making pizza from the Crust & Crumb recipe for several years, with great results, but the new recipe is both superior in performance, and significantly easier to make. Honestly, with a copy of Apprentice and a pizza stone, you can make world-class pizza at home.

Bottom line: whether you have zero bread books or (like me) seven, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is a must-have.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)
• Powell’s Books (hardback

I’ve transcribed this recipe after carefully observing a number of German people in my house. This is not a traditional German recipe, although if you follow it, you will end up with a traditional German dish.

1. Drive out of town, past three supermarkets, to the organic produce stand.
   
2. Hand-select a dozen of the freshest, ripest, most pure and beautiful organic locally-grown Roma tomatoes you can find.
   
3. Upon returning home, store the tomatoes in the refrigerator.
   
4. After finding that your taciturn son-in-law has moved the tomatoes from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter, move the tomatoes back into the refrigerator.
   
5. After finding that your taciturn son-in-law has moved the tomatoes from the refrigerator to the small table on the other side of the kitchen, where the rest of the keeps-fresh-at-room-temperature produce is kept fresh, move the tomatoes back into the refrigerator.
   
6. At the time of the next meal, realize that the refrigerator has sapped all flavor from the tomatoes. Go to one of the supermarkets you passed in step 1 and buy a large roasted chicken. Ignore the tomatoes. Eat the chicken with your fingers.

OK, I admit it, I’m teasing a little bit. The back-and-forth with the tomatoes really happened. It was pretty funny at the time, an apparent culture clash, like the way some people store bread in the refrigerator (eek!) or peanut butter in the cabinet. But I think my in-laws planned to eat that greasy chicken for lunch anyway.

Here’s what Deborah Madison, one of the heroes of vegetarian cooking and author of the fabulous Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, has to say about storing tomatoes: Keep tomatoes at room temperature or in a cool place, but not in the refrigerator unless a glut makes it impossible to do otherwise. Cold kills everything about them that’s good.

…unless you really like that fresh-from-the-can flavor.

I bought this book long before I became a vegetarian.

Of course, I was buying it as a gift for my wife. But still, even as an omnivore I could immediately see the book’s value.

This volume is an encyclopedia of vegetable knowledge. For every edible plant you can name, Madison tells how to select, store, and clean it, and then she gives several great recipes, plus a list of recommended “go-withs.”

If you’ve ever found yourself in the grocery, looking at a huge mound of in-season whatevers, thinking “those look really great, and they’re cheap… but I wouldn’t begin to know what to do with them,” go ahead and buy some anyway. This book will tell you what to do.

The index is 18 pages long. The value of this resource can not be overstated; it is the key to the idea expressed above — that I can look up whatever vegetable I have at hand, and immediately learn how to prepare it.

The book itself tops 700 pages, and contains probably 1400 recipes: casseroles, salads, soups, pastas, sauces, sandwiches, desserts, basically everything you can think of that doesn’t have meat in it.

There are about twelve recipes we make frequently. These are my favorite three:

1. Pesto (p. 57), the best I’ve ever had.
2. Lentil Minestrone (p. 225), my favorite soup in the world.
3. Lasagne with eggplant and chard (p. 468). This is a wonderful entree choice for a dinner party (look out, I’m channeling Martha Stewart), because it can be made the day before.

Again, you need not be a vegetarian to find this book useful. Unless you’re on the Atkins diet, throwing back a charcuterie platter three times a day and really believing all that fat isn’t going to give you a heart attack, you probably eat grains and vegetables every day — which means you’ll appreciate this cookbook.

Check out the Amazon link (below) for “look inside” preview pages, and many positive reviews.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)