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After two days of restaurant food, including one day where I’d succumbed to the unwillingness of the world outside my kitchen to offer anything to eat that didn’t used to walk around and stink, I was desperate for a salad. The pickings were slim out there along highway 12, thousands of acres of grape vines and walnut trees notwithstanding, so we ended up at Safeway (regional supermarket chain) in Lodi, and I was sent inside to inspect the deli.

This store offered the traditional sandwiches-to-order station, plus, unusually I thought, a China Express takeout counter.

I acknowledged to the sandwich clerk that I’d seen the prepackaged salads, and asked if, in addition, the store offered an open salad bar. The clerk said no. Then, unhelpfully, he offered “But we’re having a special on Asian barbecued spareribs with peanut sauce, just $2.49 with your Safeway Club Card.” Why he felt that was relevant, I have no idea, but I stepped away before he recited any other of the day’s exciting sale events around the store.

We gathered all our food selections, queued for the checkout, and asked the cashier if she knew of a park in the area where we could eat. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not from around here. Let me ask someone else.” She relayed our query aloud to the next cashier, making our request a lot more public than I appreciated, earning me suspicious stares from all the locals in line around me, as if it was a wholly unnatural thing to seek a public picnic area on a Sunday afternoon. Or maybe they were reacting to my T-shirt, which depicted Iron Maiden’s grotesque mascot/gremlin Eddie with middle fingers on both hands raised toward the viewer, and a hand-drawn speech balloon proclaiming in ragged four-inch-high letters “LODI SUCKS!”

Ultimately no one was able to help us, because the entire staff of the Lodi Safeway commutes in from out of town, where they have no parks. But we found a suitable picnic area anyway, thanks to my eagle-eyed wife, who can apparently spot those brown “state park” signs while driving and conversing simultaneously in two languages. So we had a nice lunch, took a brief walk along the river, and, I don’t know, the world exploded or something, preventing me from finding a satisfying wrap-up to what has become a fairly tedious story.

Last weekend I was driving through Lodi, CA in my sensible, aging Golfmobile when I was passed by four teenagers in a perfectly restored 1968 Camaro convertible, and then by two more young guys in a beater ‘72 Nova (in faded metallic green and spraycan primer). The thing that caught my attention is that both those cars rolled out of Detroit about 15 years before their current owners were born. I totally understand the appeal of classic American musclecars, having owned one myself, but I marvel that over time it’s the same cars, from the same short period of about seven years, that gearhead teenagers keep turning to.

If you think this dispassionate statement of intellectual curiousity is really a disguised lament for the lack of classic American musclecars in my garage, you’re probably right.

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