Farmer's Market Pizza

Sunday, July 29, 2007
Even though I have made both pizza crust recipes in TBB several times, to excellent results, I tried something new this weekend: the Neopolitan pizza dough recipe from
The Bread Baker's Apprentice. As an apprentice, I did not do so well.
The good news is that the recipe makes enough for six pizzas, so I have five in the freezer. The bad news may be that there are still five in the freezer. I'll see after next time.
Peter Reinhart gives instructions for stretching the pizza dough by tossing it in the air. Like anybody could do it. So I tossed it for a while, but after a few tosses, I started getting big holes in the middle of the dough. I'd shape it back into a nice patty, and start tossing it again. Again, I got big holes in the middle. Finally, I resorted to a rolling pin, which worked fine, although it didn't have that same air of savoir faire.
Then he suggested putting the stretched-thin pizza dough on a wooden paddle and sliding it onto a pizza stone. I figured that the sliding was going to go about as well as the tossing did, with far more disastrous possibilities, so I put the dough on a pizza pan.
Reinhart says you should bake it at as high a temperature as your oven can go--800 degrees if possible. I set my oven at 800, being very impressed that it would go that high. But instead of turning on, the oven flashed the number "800" and bleated pathetically. I finally understood it was telling me that it did not understand this number. It didn't understand 700 or 600 either, but settled down at 550.
For the topping, I sauteed summer squash, fennel and onion in olive oil. Then I added some sliced cherry tomatoes and a sliced Italian pepper. I topped it with fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, and grated parmesan, and stuck it in the hot oven (burning my arm in the process, which made me think they knew what they were doing when they decided not to allow their ovens to go up to 800 degrees).
Within six minutes, the outer crust was browned nicely, and the cheese were melted, and I strewed on some fresh basil. Things were looking up. Unfortunately, when I cut into the pizza, I realized that the bottom crust was not cooked through, so we had some really excellent pizza until you got into the middle. Then we had something soft and soggy, topped with a lot of vegetables.
I think that things might improve if I put the oven rack at the very bottom next time, so that it will cook through. I think maybe I shouldn't put so many vegetables on, especially rather wet vegetables like summer squash. It would also probably be a good idea not to bump my arm into the preheated pizza stone.

Half Wheat Bread

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Pondering what bread to bake next, I looked in the cupboards with my bread-making equipment and noticed bread pans. Hmm, I said to myself, I haven't made a plain loaf of bread for many months. I also said to myself, I haven't used this whole wheat flour for a while. (In fact, when I looked at the flour, I saw that it's "best if used before" date was sometime last year. I know how Rose feels about old flour, but I decided to use it one more time before I threw it away).
I looked at a bunch of recipes, but nothing quite struck my fancy. The whole wheat breads all looked too dense and hearty, and I was in the mood for something lighter. I finally decided to use Rose's basic white bread recipe and just substitute half whole wheat flour; hence the half wheat. Or it could be half white, I guess. (No, not half wit).

This bread came out very well, especially for being rushed into shape. We had to leave at 5:00, so I wanted the bread to be ready by 3:00. I started mixing the sponge around 9:30, but when I read the recipe carefully, I realized that if I used all the maximum rising times, the bread would not come out of the oven until 6:00. So I used the minimum rising times, and shaved some more time off. It didn't seem to matter one bit. I probably wouldn't have needed to throw the elderly flour away after all.
But the real star of this bread was the butter. You may have seen the article in the NYTimes about making your own butter. I cut it out, but didn't really intend to try it. I mean, how Little House on the Prairie is making your own butter? If you start that, soon you'll be weaving your own yarn, or putting a henhouse in your garage. But the lure of home-churned butter is too great to resist.
Well, off course, it's not home-churned. It's home KitchenAided with the whisk attachment. I have always loved to whip cream. It was my job as a child whenever we had dessert with whipped cream, which was never often enough. But my mother always cautioned me not to beat it for too long "or it will turn into butter." So I grew up with this idea that one millisecond too long, and your nice whipped cream would turn into a big chunk of butter. If my mother were still alive, I'd tell her not to worry: there is a long, long period of time before the whipped cream becomes butter. But that's all there is to it. Whip it long enough (like ten minutes) and suddenly, immediately after attaining a curdish consistency, it starts sploshing liquid onto the plastic wrap that the directions have helpfully told you to cover the bowl with, it does what it's supposed to do. The thick stuff is butter. The milky stuff is--you'll never guess--buttermilk.
I like my butter unsalted, but Jim doesn't, so, like the good wife that I am, I sprinkled a little sea salt into most of the butter.

If I had had more time, I might have shaped the butter into something cute. As it was, we barely had time to cut into the still warm bread, slather it with incredibly fresh and delicious butter, and eat three pieces each.
Then we had to leave to go to a party. It's a hard life, but someone has to do it.

I've Been Tagged

Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Melinda, baker par excellence, blogster, and faithful reader, tagged me to list seven things you might not know about me. Honestly, there are many things that people might not know about me, but they are all supremely uninteresting. Melinda said she hoped that I would have some secret like maybe teaching belly dancing while I was in law school. Afraid not. My list would be more interesting if Melinda had just made up seven things about me.

1. I had a pet lamb when I was a little girl. The lamb recognized me by sniffing knees. When she came to my knees, she got very excited, and bounded around. No one else has ever been excited by my knees.

2. When I was in high school, I won the “best actress” award, for playing Miss Pidgie McDougall, an old maid (back in the day when no one objected to the term “old maid”), in a very bad play called “Off the Tracks.” Guaranteed laugh line: “My name is Pidgie McDougall. I’m in men’s underwear.”

3. I love grilled bologna sandwiches. These sandwiches have absolutely no culinary redemptive value, and I should be ashamed of myself for eating them, much less admitting to it.

4. I won the patriotic essay contest sponsored by the American Legion two years in a row, in 7th and 8th grade. My masterwork was entitled “What America Means to Me.”

5. Bats terrify me. I wish they didn’t exist. On several occasions, bats have gotten in our house, and awakened me by swooping around our bedroom in the middle of the night. This is the drill: I scream and cover my face with the sheets. Jim wakes up and realizes there’s a bat in the room (because I’m screaming, “There’s a bat!”). He gets up and chases after the bat. He finally catches it and releases it outside. We argue about whether he should have killed the awful thing. He goes back to sleep. I don’t.

6. I have always wanted to sing torch songs in a piano bar.

7. When my office had a case that went to the United States Supreme Court, I worked on the brief and sat at counsel table. I was given a souvenir quill pen, which I have never used. I learned that Justice Scalia likes to tell jokes during oral argument and seems miffed if no one laughs. I also learned that no one on the Court thinks it’s amusing if one of the lawyers tells a joke.

Green Olive Bread - Two Ways

Sunday, July 15, 2007
I've had a hankering for green olive bread ever since I saw it at a bakery in Vancouver. I've intended to bake it for the last few weeks, but each weekend has been miserable--the kind of weather that makes you understand that "warm" is much too soft and cozy a word to describe global warming; that it means the weather could be godawful: hot, humid, and tropical. And this is Minnesota.
But this weekend the weather was wonderful, and it didn't feel sinful to turn on my oven, so I did. I used Rose's olive bread recipe, except that I substituted green olives (a combination of Sicilian, Picholine, and Cerignola) instead of black olives. Also, as I've been doing since I got my starter started, I add a glop or two of starter to the dough. I don't know how much difference it makes, but it doesn't do any harm.
On Saturday, I shaped a boule in my new banetton and baked it in the SteamMaker. A boule is supposed to have less of a blast of steam than a baguette, and more time under the metal cover than a baguette. This supposedly makes a crust that is crisp, yet chewy, rather than the baguette's shatteringly crisp crust. I didn't get my blast of steam immediately because Jim, who is in charge of the steam, wasn't ready when the bread was. I still have no complaints about the bread. We went to our friends the Millers' house for dinner, and brought a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. The bread was more popular than the wine.

Today we needed a celebratory loaf of bread to go with the lovely French champagne we got to celebrate Sarah's graduation from college. As we like to say, she took the scenic route toward graduation, and, even though it took slightly longer than the traditional four years, she did it her own way, and cheers to her, I say. I decided to make a torpedo-shaped loaf in my new La Cloche Italian-bread baker. The olive bread does very well in this shape as well, and it popped right out of the floured La Cloche.

The bread baked in La Cloche may not get quite as golden brown as the one baked without it, but the texture may be slightly better, although it may also just be that this size is easier to slice than a round loaf. To go with the champagne, we got a few of Sarah's favorite snacks--Cambozola cheese and mascarpone with smoked salmon. James, Sarah's boyfriend, also dropped by and helped us celebrate. Sarah and I are very taken with our new game: if you had to change your name to anything other than what it is now, what name would you choose? Sarah and I keep changing our minds, as we think of new considerations. For some reason, Jim and James both think it's silly, and respond by saying, "But I like my own name and I don't want to change it." But by the time we'd downed the champagne and eaten the last crumb of bread, even they were feeling expansive enough to get in the spirit of the game.

Baguettes--the Steamfast way

Saturday, June 23, 2007
Somewhere in her blog, Rose recommended the Steam Maker , and I mentioned to Jim that I wanted to get one someday when we were rich. Instead of waiting for wealth, however, he wanted to get one for my birthday last month. I told him it was a frivolous purchase, but he bought it anyway. I just made amazing baguettes with this contraption, and I'm now so glad that I have it.

It's a little bit Rube Goldberg-ish, and I was kind of scared to do the big swish of steam myself because I thought I might burn myself. "Danger," the instructions say. "This unit is not a toy." "Never point nozzle at people or pets."
Here's what you do--you just make your baguettes (I followed Rose's recipe, which somehow seemed much easier than the first time I did it). You put them on a baking stone in a 450-degree oven. Then you cover them with the lid to the Steam Maker, and you get your spouse to spray steam in the hole in the cover for 30 seconds. This is really fun, especially if you're not doing it yourself. Then you bake it, covered, for six or seven minutes.

Then you take the lid off and bake it for another 23 minutes or so, turning the oven stone once during the process.


When the loaves come out of the oven, the look pretty good. But it's not until you tap them with your fingernail that you realize that they have an extraordinary crust--the kind that you get only in the very best artisan loaf. Honestly, I may have eaten baguettes that were this good, but I have never eaten one that was any better. And I have never eaten one that was so fresh out of the oven. I feel that all of my work last year, as I was making my way through The Bread Bible for the first time, led to this point, and I may never bake another bread that (to me, at least) is this satisfying.

You know that game where you have to pick three foods that you'd want if you were stranded on a desert island and you could have three things each day? This bread would be one of mine. The only problem with that is that it really couldn't be a humid island. Jim and I ate the first loaf in about 15 minutes. Then we couldn't eat any more. I thought about freezing the second one, but decided we could just eat it for breakfast. The lovely crispy, crackly crust did not make it through a humid Minnesota summer night unscathed, however. The bread was still good the second day, but the crust became chewy rather than crisp. I will therefore have to specify that my bread must be delivered to my desert island immediately after being baked. No day-old bread in my fantasy.

Braised Spring Vegetables with Cornmeal-Herb Dumplings

Thursday, June 21, 2007
Yesterday I opened the food section of the NYTimes and found this recipe. What luck! This year, I, along with my friends Sara and Bridget, are getting weekly boxes of organic vegetables raised on a very high-minded farm in Wisconsin. Opening the boxes every week is a little bit like Christmas (if you're a rabbit), because you never know for sure what you're getting, and you're not sure that you will know what to do with it once you have it.
Melissa Clark's recipe for braised vegetables is based on her trip to the Union Square Greenmarket, where she picked up a bunch of vegetables that tickled her fancy, and turned them into a nice braise with dumplings. I figured that my spring vegetables wouldn't be all that different from hers, so I decided I'd just make this dish with whatever I got in my box today, which turned out to be summer squash, Swiss chard, dill, green onions, garlic scapes, peas, and romaine. (I also got Chinese cabbage and red leaf lettuce, but I saved them for another day). I added a red onion and some garlic I already had, and otherwise followed the recipe, which was just a matter of carmelizing the red onion, then adding the garlic, onions, squash and chard stems, putting in a few glugs of white wine, adding the peas and garlic scapes, and simmering it, along with some chicken broth, for a few minutes. The chard, romaine, and dill went in at the end and cooked for another few minutes; finally, I stirred in some grated Parmesan.
In the meantime, I'd made the dumplings--the reason this is on a bread blog--and cooked them in boiling water. (Oh, how my Viking cooktop loves to boil water!) I love dumplings--they're so homey! And how could you be anything else with a name like dumpling? (Although Charlotte Rampling isn't especially homey, and her name is almost like dumpling).
The dumplings were made with flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt and pepper, buttermilk (or regular milk with lemon juice squeezed into it if you've already decided you're going to make dinner without going to the grocery store for anything you might not have), eggs, chopped mint and chives.
Even though it was meatless, Jim still liked the dinner quite a lot, and so did I. And we felt so virtuous! Not only were we eating our vegetables, but we were also eating organic vegetables picked that very morning.

Best Blueberry Muffins

Sunday, June 17, 2007
It being Father's Day, and Jim being very fond of both scones and blueberries, it seemed like a good idea to bake blueberry scones.
The claim of "best" blueberry muffins is not mine--it's from Cook's Illustrated. I'm sure that most of you know Cook's; it's the magazine where someone tries about 400 variations of a particular recipe and then says that the final recipe is the best possible version. I'm not sure that I would call this the very best possible blueberry scone, but I'm also not sure I've ever had a better one.
I wanted to try this particular recipe because it had a couple of intriguing techniques. Instead of mixing the butter into the flour with your fingers or with a pastry blender, the author (J. Kenji Alt), came up with the rather brilliant idea of grating frozen butter into the flour mixture (flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest). Although grating the butter was kind of a pain, it couldn't be easier to toss everything together so that the butter stays cold.
Another clever variation is to fold the dough using several business letter turns to get buttery layers--a la puff pastry. Finally, instead of mixing the blueberries into the dough (thus getting blue dough), the author came up with the idea of rolling the dough into a rectangle, pressing the blueberries on top, and then rolling the dough, jellyroll fashion, into a log. Finally, you press the log into a rectangle and cut into eight scone-shaped triangles.
Jim was very pleased. Sarah was very pleased. I was also pleased, especially because I got to use my dough scraper, which makes me feel like I know what I'm doing. Elizabeth, home for the weekend, announced that she didn't like scones and that if you are going to eat a scone, you might as well just eat a big lump of butter. (She did eat half of one on Monday, and admitted that it might be just a tad tastier than the lump of butter option).

Pane di Terni

Saturday, June 9, 2007
According to Carol Field, author of The Italian Baker, this rustic bread from Terni, a city in southern Umbria, "is in such great demand that quantities of it are rushed to Rome daily." Neither the people of Terni nor the people of Rome would recognize this as Pane di Terni, however, because I mistakenly baked it upside down.
I chose this bread not because I had a hankering for Pane di Terni; I've never heard of the bread or the city. I chose it because it calls for whole-wheat pastry flour, and I have some that I picked up for some reason or another and I wanted to use it up.
First you make a biga the night before you want the bread; the next morning, you mix the biga with water, all-purpose flour, and the pastry flour, as well as yeast and a little salt (optional because the authentic pane di Terni doesn't use salt). Then you form it into four round loaves and let it rise. Of course, I assumed that the top of the loaves was going to be the top of the bread. But then you turn it over, dimple the bottoms ot the loaves, and brush them with olive oil.
That's funny, I said to myself, usually when you dimple bread, you dimple the top. So I dimpled, oiled, and turned over. Only after they were baked did I see that actually the bottoms were supposed to become the dimpled tops. And maybe that accounts for why the bread turned out to be kind of shapeless. But, you know, it turned out to be quite good anyway, with a nice crust amd a good texture. I had some for toast the next morning, and it was excellent that way too.
We had a dinner party on Saturday with two other couples. I told Jim that I thought I'd give away two of the loaves to them if they were good. Jim told me I should let them know ahead of time to give them incentive. I said, "incentive to do what?" "To be good," he said, "you know how Doug is. He's sure to misbehave otherwise." I explained that it was a question of whether the bread was good, not the guests. And Doug did not misbehave.

Pane di Como

Sunday, June 3, 2007
My wonderful sister-in-law, Betty, gave me a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma for Christmas. It took me five months to decide what I wanted--out of so many possibilities--but I finally settled on a French banneton. I'd been making any recipes that required a banneton with a makeshift combination of a plastic colander, a cotton towel, and a piece of cardboard cut to fit the bottom of the colander. It worked fine, but it didn't make the lovely decorative rings of flour that you get with an authentic banneton.
After I bought the Williams-Sonoma banntton, Jim decided that a banneton was just what I needed for my birthday, so suddenly I went from no bannetons to two. I was going to return one, but then I happened on a recipe for Pane di Como, from The Italian Baker, which made two loaves of bread, each requiring its own banntton. Well, there you go. Kismet.
My first foray into the banneton world had mixed results. The bread was awfully good, but the shape didn't meet my expectations or satisfy my hopes. The dough was supposed to be "elastic but still slightly sticky," when the kneading was done, and mine was probably still too sticky. It raised beautifully, up to the top of the banetton, just as it was supposed to do, but when I turned it over on the hot baking stone (not an easy feat for someone who was told in the eighth grade that her fine motor skills were sub-par and her vocational choices might be limited), it sank into a limp puddle. But it was a limp puddle with distinctive banneton markings.

Although the directions said that both loaves could be baked on the stone at the same time, this was clearly not going to work if the loaves both spread out, as they did, so I baked them separately, which is why one loaf is darker than the other. And I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to crack on top, but they did. I might feel unhappier with the result if the taste hadn't been so good. And I still think they're cute.

Vancouver

Sunday, June 3, 2007
On Friday, we returned from a 10-day jaunt to Vancouver, and then to points north: Juneau, Skagway, the Hubbard Glacier, and Ketchikan, via the Celebrity Mercury. Vancouver is a beautiful city, with plenty of exceptional eating opportunities. (The cruise--not so much. Let me just say that a woman at our table (a very fine woman) remarked that the broccoli soup served for dinner was nowhere near as good as the cream of broccoli soup with cheese at Denny's.
But Vancouver....that's a whole different story. In the three days we were there, we concentrated our eating at several places recommended by Food and Wine--Salt Tasting Room, C Restaurant, and Tojo's. All were great choices.
Salt is hidden away down an alley; from one direction, the neighborhood is very hip and chic. From another, it's on the seedy side. We took the cute route there, but accidentally wandered down some of the less beautiful areas of Vancouver on the way back to our hotel. We ran into a man from Australia who told us a long and complicated tale of woe, which we could barely understand until he finally got to the end--he needed $11 to get a bus ticket. (Back to Australia?) Although I gave him points for making the request for precisely $11, we turned him down, whereupon he turned and yelled, "Fuck you!" Not very good customer relations, although I guess he figured he'd already lost us.
Salt is an oddity in that it's a restaurant with no kitchen--just tasting plates of cured meats, cheeses, and condiments, and a nice selection of wine. You order plates of meat, cheese, or both, with a specific condiment for each selection. Although the restaurant was not filled with the over-60 crowd, our tattooed and heavily pierced waitress was very friendly and helped us pick a cheese plate of manchego with Marcona almonds, smoked gouda with cornichons, and ash camembert with blueberry honey and a meat plate of New York corned beef with Guinness mustard, coppa with balsamic reduction, and salami with peppers.

We both had the same wine flights: Wild Goose Sauvignon Blanc, Joie Pinot Noir Rose, and Clos de Los Siete Mendoza.

This was great fun, and we thought about the possibility of returning there. But we had other goals!
The next night we were joined by our traveling partners, June and Dave Miller. The four of us went to C Restaurant, which is not located down an alley, but overlooks beautiful False Creek and the mountains. (For a prairie person like me, having both ocean and mountains to gaze upon is almost too much visual stimulation to bear). Jim took lots of pictures at C, but I can't identify all the ingredients except in mine. I started out with a watercress salad with sablefish and scallop sausage and a black sesame vinaigrette.

Watercress is my very favorite green, and it's hard to find in its perfect state, not to mention its perfect state embellished with a sablefish and scallop sausage--so delicate, and yet not overwhelmed by the peppery watercress.
Our waiter said the best things on the menu were scallops and halibut, so, since I'd done the scallops in my first course, I choose crispy halibut for the main.

C is routinely picked as the best seafood restaurant in a city of excellent seafood restaurants, and this halibut shows why. Perfectly fresh fish cooked very simply; every bite was the essence of halibut. It was accompanied by bits of Yukon Gold potato, spot prawns, and "melted leeks" in a saffron consomme.
Jim also chose a crispy trout with fava beans. (He always orders anything with fava beans after seeing Silence of the Lambs. Sometimes even with a nice chianti).
The next night we went to Tojo's. Tojo's is an institution in Vancouver--so much so that it's listed in the book 1,000 Things to see Before You Die. Being the kind of person I am, I check things off in this book after I see them, so naturally I wanted to visit Tojo's, which is described as "maintaining an unwavering commitment to fresh local ingredients."
Friends, it must be said that your blogger and your photographer failed you here. We all ordered the Omakase menu--omakase is translated as "trusting," and it's the Japanese version of a tasting menu. Although every course was unfailingly delicious, we were so enrapt with the eating part that we forgot the recording part. I have pictures of only one fish course--the halibut cheeks. I'm sorry because they were uniformly photogenic.
This was a leisurely dinner. Our waitress apologized profusely for the slow service. She said (or we thought she said) that the prime minister and his party of 28 were at the restaurant and that's why it was taking so long. Even though the real prime minister was probably still in Afghanistan, this person and 27 of his friends had convinced the friendly people at Tojo's that they were Important People, but we didn't care because the food was still terrific, and it gave us a chance to play Guess the Name of the Canadian Prime Minister.

We had a wonderful fish and vegetable mousse, as well as the best sushi I've ever eaten. But, alas, no photographs. We did manage to rouse ourselves from our greedy consumption to take a picture of the dessert--surprisingly good--fresh fruit with coconut ice cream and a sesame cookie:

And a picture of the final glasses of plum wine.

The next day was also a food day, as we trekked around Granville Island, concentrating on the Granville Markets. I especially loved the baskets and trays of breads, rolls, scones, and muffins at the Terra Bread stand. I got lots of new ideas for baking. (And to think that when I started the Bread Bible project, I thought maybe that by the end of it, I would have made every possible bread.)



There were so many little markets--I was fantasizing about living in Vancouver and going to the Granville Markets every afternoon to pick up something for dinner. We could have, but did not, taken photos of every individual seller--but we had to include one of the fruit vendors.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Pane Siciliano

Sunday, May 20, 2007
When I first saw pictures of this bread in The Bread-Baker's Apprentice, I knew I had to try it. The beautiful S-shape and the deep brown crust sprinkled with sesame seeds just called to me. I'm so glad it did--it's one of the most delicious breads I've ever made. As a testament to the irrestible nature of this bread, I baked three loaves this weekend. On Sunday evening, there is one-half of a piece left. (I did give one loaf away, but still...).
The directions say this is a three-day process. Day 1: Make the pate fermentee. Day 2: Mix, shape, and let rise in the refrigerator. Day 3: Bake.
The pate fermentee was easy--just a mixture of bread flour, durum flour, salt, water, and yeast. (The recipe calls for semolina flour, but Rose likes durum flour better, and I think she's right).
The second day was the fun part. The pate fermentee is mixed with more bread and durum flours, more salt, water, and yeast, plus olive oil and honey. After this rises for a few hours, it's shaped. You cut the dough in thirds, roll and stretch each part into a long, thin 24-inch cylinder. Then you wind each side up toward the center, going in opposite directions. Spray with water, sprinkle withs sesame seeds, then spray with oil, and place on parchment-papered baking sheets. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Now, I honestly did not believe that this was going to work. The glossy photos of this bread looked so beautiful, so professional, that I figured mine would be a sad, clumsy approximation. But they were doing so well in their unbaked state that I couldn't resist baking one yesterday, even though Peter Reinhart says they have to stay refrigerated at least overnight to develop their full flavor.

I was so pleased when I saw this that I didn't even care if it was lacking its full flavor potential. We had it for dinner, with spicy grilled shrimp and steamed asparagus. It was such a low-fat dinner that we felt no guilt at all as we ate piece after piece of bread. The crust was perfect, and the bread itself had such depth of flavor that it didn't need butter or olive oil. (Although they didn't hurt it).

Reinhart has a different method for oven-steaming than Rose does. Instead of using ice cubes, he recommends pouring very hot water into a pre-heated pan. That was scary. I had boiled the water about a half-hour before I needed it, so it was quite hot. When I poured it into the pan, which had been pre-heated to 500, it snapped, sizzled, and jumped all over the oven. It did make a lovely crust, but it also scared the bejesus out of me, so I rejected that method.
Today, when I made the second and third loaves, I put room temperature water into the preheated pan. That was much less frightening, although it probably didn't make as much steam. These two loaves also came out looking quite photogenic. I told Jim and Sarah that the second and third loaves, which had been in the refrigerator an extra 24 hours, should have a noticeably more developed flavor, so we were all forced to do taste tests. The verdict: loaves two and three were possibly better--in an extremely subtle way--than loaf one. But loaf one was so good that you should feel free to make this bread if you have only two days to putter around the kitchen.

This Sicilian bread is highly satisfactory to make and beautiful to present. It kept making me wish that I had the tiniest bit of Italian ancestry--I had such an urge to pass this off as a recipe from my great-grandmother. In fact, I was trying to sound like an Italian grandmother in the kitchen in hopes of somehow giving off an aura of authenticity, but I ended up sounding like Carmela Soprano. Fortunately, that didn't hurt the bread.

Postscript to sourdough breads

Monday, May 14, 2007
After I finished yesterday's post about the sourdough bread, Jim said, rather mournfully, "but you didn't use any of the pictures I posed so carefully to look like the 1939 World's Fair." I said, "Huh?" He said, "you know, the World's Fair." I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about." He said, "Sure you do--the trylon and perisphere." I said, "Jim, I seriously do not have any idea what you're talking about."

So then he sent me this picture. And told me that his sister Betty had had salt and pepper shakers in the form of these famous (!?) structures, which is proof positive that they are well-known.

Even though at my office, among my very young colleagues, I am well known for being older than dirt, I don't know anything about the trylon and the whatever, but far be it from me to deprive Jim of his visual joke, even though I'm not so sure anyone will get it.

My Very Own Sourdough

May 13, 2007
After all the complaining I did about my slow-starting starter, I feel very proud to announce that what it lacked in speed, it made up for in staying power. I made the basic sourdough bread in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I like this book, although I don't find that he has the same comforting, reassuring voice that Rose has. With Rose's recipes, I always felt that I knew exactly what texture the dough should be, and I knew as I went along that things were going to be all right. And I used Rose's shaping techniques, which seem more understandable to me. I liked that his sourdough recipe made two loaves. I was going to bake them both yesterday, but then it occurred to me that I could just put the dough back in the refrigerator, where it would just gain in flavor overnight. On Saturday I used La Cloche to make a boule.

This was a very nice loaf of bread, although I think it could have done with another five minutes in the oven. With Wonder Bread being a zero and San Francisco sourdough being a ten, I prefer a four or five on the sourdough scale--this was about a 3.5, which was pretty impressive for its first outing.
Today I got out my baguette pan and made one baguette.

I could have made two loaves--this one rose much more enthusiastically than I expected, and nearly popped out of the baguette pan. I may have overcompensated a bit for the first loaf, which was a little too pale. But this one tasted just about perfect--the overnight refrigeration was an excellent idea--with a few cheeses, some Italian salami, and strawberries. And wine. Jim bought two bottles of wine (pouilly-fuisse and pinot noir) for Mother's Day, and naturally I had to try both since he bought them just for me. I thought the white wine had the edge, but it was necessary to keep sampling so I could be sure. Sarah and Jim agreed, using the same technique.
We're going to Vancouver and then to Alaska, so I have only one more weekend to bake bread before we leave. Elizabeth gave me Peter Reinhart's Crust and Crumb for Mother's Day, and I think I'll try something from that book. My bread cookbook collection now numbers five.

Before and After

Monday, May 7, 2007
I promised some before and after pictures of the kitchen, and then I'm done talking about the kitchen and back to baking bread.
This is the wall facing north, or the sink wall:


More windows now, so there's a lot more natural light. No cabinets at all on this wall. I wanted more cabinets and fewer windows; Michael wanted more windows and told me I'd have all the cabinets I'd need.
This is the east wall, facing out on the rear garden.


The west wall now has a beautiful Viking cooktop.

Before, it had an old stove that never sat straight on the floor. Whenever you sauteed something, all the oil (and eventually the food) immediately moved over to the lower part of the stove. Both Jim and I marveled when we used the new cooktop--the oil stayed where you put it! Miraculous!

The old sink:

The new sink:

The pantry area now has lots of little nooks and crannies, but also has big enough spaces so I can have most of my bread-baking equipment in one area:


Before, there was space there, but it wasn't pretty.

There's a lot happening on the south wall now--the refrigerator, cabinets, a wine rack, the oven.
Before, it was just a wall with a small kitchen table.

Before the remodel, there was a door just leading from the kitchen to the hallway:

Now, no more wasted space.

Closeups of the knobs and pulls:


Before, my cookbooks were smooshed into a small space above the microwave in the pantry.

Now, most of them are in a long shelf beside the refrigerator and above the doorway to the new pantry. The shelf is long enough that there are even empty spaces on the shelf, although I just uncovered another box of cookbooks in the basement.

A smaller shelf next to the cooktop holds the books that I use most frequently. Note the burgeoning number (well, four) of bread cookbooks.


I'm gradually getting used to the kitchen, and it is gradually becoming my own space, although even a fancy kitchen doesn't guarantee that you won't mess up a recipe.