DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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

posted to area: Cookbooks
updated: 2004-06-08 19:08:18

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.

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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

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)

posted to area: Cookbooks
updated: 2004-05-01 14:07:41

“Hi, this is Ramon calling from Pacific Bell. I’m calling you today to sell you a bunch of crap you don’t need or want. Interrupt me if you want to get a word through, or I’ll just leap right into my sales spiel until, beaten down by the sheer weight of my diction, you’ll commit to another $20/month worth of uninteresting telco services that we’ll later charge you to disable —”

OK, that’s not exactly what he said, but it gives you the idea.

“This sounds great,” I chirp in my friendliest, most gullible voice. “I’m on the other line, though; could you hang on for just a sec?”

The prospect of a sale inflated his professionally cheerful voice to the point of bursting. “Sure!” he gushed. By reflex I wiped the earpiece of my phone on my pantsleg.

And then I pressed the “hold” button on the telephone, and put the handset back into the cradle. I had no intention of picking it up again. I wanted him to rot in hold hell, without even sappy music to keep him company. Let him wait that first minute, expecting me to return at any time, maybe filling out the order screen with my personal data, optimistically checking off a full complement of revenue-bearing services… and the second minute, wondering what’s taking so long, but still sure of a pending sale… and a third minute, beginning to believe I’ve forgotten about him, seeing the sure sale fade away, fingers still poised above the keys and the order form half-filled-out… and the fourth minute, starting to sweat, falling behind his quota, watching the clock… and the fifth and final minute, anger welling up as he backspaces through all the data he’d entered into the order form, realizing I had no intention of ordering anything and that with a few simple words I’d tied him up for over five minutes, preventing him from bothering the next half-dozen victims on his list in a timely fashion.

Thanks for playing along, Ramon. Good luck with that quota. Call back anytime!

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posted to channel: Privacy
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16

Its cover proclaims it to be “the most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow,” which I’ve never heard of, which should tell you how many ambitious American novels I read. I discovered this book through a “you might also enjoy” link at Amazon, and although I don’t remember what title I’d been researching, the recommendation gnomes at Amazon were right: I also liked this book.

It’s vast, or I guess “ambitious” if I were a lit scholar. Either way means the same: 600+ pages with frequent detours into microbiology, art history, and music theory. It’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The writing is brilliant, obviously so even to a pedestrian pop-fiction aficionado like me. The text contains dozens of instances of subtle wordplay that will delight the language geeks in the audience. Here are two examples:

A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor’s cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler’s area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering’s side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. (p. 248)

Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. (p. 292)

In construction, this story is similar to Cryptonomicon, which is also long (err, “ambitious”) and peopled by memorable, complex characters. Both stories span 50 years. Both stories contain detailed and intelligent forays beyond the narrative. Both recently appeared in a Jon Carroll’s list of “brainy, pyrotechnical novels” (along with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which I’ve added to my reading list for the summer).

At the heart of Powers’ story is the obsession of one character with DNA (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from very few base compounds) and with Bach’s piano composition “The Goldberg Variations” (comprised, in unimaginable complexity, from a simple base melody). While the discussions of biology and life science did not appeal, the analyses of Bach’s music did, so much so that I wished I’d had a copy of the music handy, as a soundtrack to the text. (For reference, the recording that captivated Ressler is Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording, catalog #BWV 988.)

This book is challenging, but challenge has its rewards. I recommend it.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

posted to area: Fiction
updated: 2004-04-19 05:53:31