Homemade Bread To Die For, Part 2

Good as the bread was that I made by following Jim Lahey's no-knead method, I wanted more complexity of flavor.  Simply put, I wanted to make bread to die for.  I experimented with different brands and types of flour, and I even ground some wheat berries for more flavor.  The results were good but not great.  Cook's Illustrated published an "improved" version of Lahey's recipe that among other ingredients called for half a bottle of beer.  I tried it: it was fussy, and only slightly more flavorful.  Then some favorable reviews appeared of Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson (Chronicle Books, 2010) and I decided to read it. 

"Read" perhaps is not the appropriate term, because in addition to Robertson's text Tartine Bread also features hundreds of photographs by Eric Wolfinger, and they are wonderfully instructive.  Wolfinger had had some culinary training but didn't know how to bake bread.  He did know how to surf, however, so he taught Robertson how to surf in exchange for being taught how to bake.  To his already existing passion for photography, Wolfinger quickly added a passion for baking.  When Robertson decided to do a book on baking for the amateur, a book like Jacques Pepin's La Technique and La Methode that would show as well as tell, Wolfinger was the obvious choice for his collaborator.

In  addition to using so many photographs, Robertson adapted the no-knead technique of Jim Lahey to suit a dough that uses what the French call un levain naturel--imagine a sourdough starter that is not old and sour but young and sweet.  Reading Tartine Bread made me realize why my earlier sourdough bread had been so mouth-puckeringly sour:  I didn't realize that the starter had to be refreshed at periodic intervals.  In other words, depending on how often you feed the starter flour and water, you can control the entire range of flavor from sweet to sour.  If I want to bake a loaf of rye, for example, I'll let the starter become a little sour.  For a loaf of white or whole wheat bread, on the other hand, I'll use a young, sweet starter.

What Kipling wrote about composing lays also holds for making a starter or un levain naturel:

     "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, 

     And every single one of them is right!"

 
Robertson gives one method using five pounds of flour, half white and half whole wheat, and I'm sure it works.  Other methods have you start with organic apples or grapes or malt extract or goat's milk.  I use a modified version of the one Patricia Wells describes in The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (4th ed.; Workman Publishing, 1999) that derives from the near-legendary Parisian baker Paul Poilane.  For reasons I'll make clear in a later post, I have changed the flour to water ratio from 2 : 1 flour to water to 1 : 1 flour to water, so the result is less like a ball of dough than a batter.

If you want to try it, first plan on four days passing before you can mix the bread.  Once you have the starter, however, it will be ready to use or re-use in just a few hours.  The process is simple; it just takes time.

     Day 1:  In a small bowl, combine a scant 1/2 cup of filtered or spring water at room temperature with a generous 1/2 cup of bread or whole wheat flour, preferably organic and unbleached.  The consistency will be similar to pancake batter.  Cover it with plastic wrap, and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours, more or less.  (If your kitchen is cold, put it in the oven with the oven light on.)

     Day 2:  The starter may have risen slightly, have a few bubbles, and perhaps a slightly acidic smell, or it may just seem inert.  In any case, add another scant 1/2 cup of water at room temperature  and a generous 1/2 cup of flour and mix well.  Re-cover and keep warm.

     Day 3: By now, the starter should be showing signs of life.  If it hasn't, throw it out and start over.  If a few bubbles are there and the starter smells a little bit like a ripe cheese, add the same quantities of water and flour, re-cover and keep warm.

     Day 4:  Almost there.  Here's a picture on the fourth day of a starter based on whole wheat flour-- Creation of the World in a Pyrex bowl!  Taste it:  it should be tangy but not sour (if it is sour, shorten the intervals of feeding).
 

Once again, add 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour.  Stir and cover.

     Day 5:  Congratulations!  You have successfully trapped wild yeast and cultivated it into a starter.  The wild yeast, together with lactic acid bacteria, have been consuming the flour and creating an alcoholic fermentation.  A by-product of that fermentation is carbon dioxide, and that, in turn, will cause your bread dough to rise. 

You are now ready to bake.  If, however, your schedule doesn't allow this, just put the starter in the fridge.  If you still can't  free up the time to bake in the next day or so, toss out 1/2 of the starter and add the same amount of water and flour.  Mix it, and return it to the fridge.  Do this every five days or so, and the starter will happily survive.

In the next post, I'll tell you how to use your starter to bake a loaf of bread so good that your friends (should you decide you really ought to share) will exclaim, "You baked this bread?  I can't believe it!"

Homemade Bread To Die For: Part I

This will be the first post of a multi-part series on how to bake an incredibly simple and even more incredibly delicious loaf of home-made bread.

My mother baked bread for much of my childhood, with the result that at some point in my 20's, I began to think about learning how to bake bread myself.  The problem was that there were always reasons not to do it right away.  I promised myself that I'd make bread after I got tenure, or perhaps during my next sabbatical, or certainly after my daughter was born--but whenever the projected time, my baking bread never came to pass.

Flash forward:  I'm now in my 60's, and after something close to forty years of procrastinating, I've finally tried my hand at making bread.  I've read Elizabeth David's wonderful book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Biscuit Books, 1994), and I've nurtured my own sourdough starter from the directions in Patricia Wells's The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (4th ed., Workman Publishing, 1999).  Truth be told, though, I don't especially like the bread I've made.  It's sour, much too sour, unfortunately.  And it rises only reluctantly.  My first attempt, in fact, resulted in the world's largest sourdough cracker.  Subsequent loaves rose slightly higher, but only slightly.  They never resembled the pictures in the books I'd read.  I concluded that baking bread didn't seem to be in my future.

Flash forward again: I'm about to fly out to San Diego to spend some time with my mother, now in her late 80's and, after a broken hip, far less mobile than she had been (she had gone fly fishing for steelhead with me when she was 85).  My wife Caroline suggested that I ask my mother to teach me how to bake her bread.  My mother was delighted with the idea. We had a great time, and the taste of her loaves brought back my childhood.

As a mature (ahem!) adult myself, however, I had to face the fact that my mother's loaf was not what I wanted to eat every day.  With butter and jam, it made delicious toast, but her bread was too sweet and too yeasty for my taste (not that I ever mentioned this to her, of course).

In 2006, however, my friend Maria sent me the link to Mark Bittman's interview with Jim Lahey in the NY Times, and it's not an exaggeration to say that my life began to change.  Jim Lahey is the founder of the Sullivan Street Bakery in NYC and the author, with Rick Flaste, of My Bread:  The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method (W. W. Norton, 2009).  Lahey's principal innovation was to come up with a method of creating an oven within an oven.  By preheating a Dutch oven, putting the risen dough into it, covering it, and popping it back into the oven, Lahey had discovered a way for the moisture in the bread dough to create steam within the Dutch oven, and steam is what creates oven spring, the final rise of the proofed bread.  Hitherto, home bakers had had to resort to pans of water steaming away in the oven or throwing ice cubes into the oven:  clumsy, messy, and not especially effective. 

Lahey's second innovation was discovering that if you let the dough rise for six to eight hours or overnight, no kneading was required.  The extended period for rising was not new, but the absence of kneading was.  With these two innovations, Jim Lahey had single-handedly changed the baking of bread.  And since Lahey used commercial yeast, the loaves were not sour.  No longer arcane, no longer complex, Lahey's method allows anyone who follows his directions to produce a really good loaf of bread.  We are all in his debt.

If you're interested, Mark Bittman's column will give you a recipe for white bread and tell you how to follow Lahey's method.  Lahey's My Bread of course goes into far more detail on various kinds of breads, pizzas, and focaccias.  As the old commercial used to say, "Try it.  You'll like it!"

Werner Herzog's Film, "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" (2010)

Werner Herzog didn't actually film this movie.  Instead, he watched at a friend's house four documentary films by the Russian director Dmitry Vasukov, and on the spot he decided he would re-edit, score, and do a voice-over for a single, ninety minute film. 

Herzog's narration inevitably reflects his point of view, and that point of view is decidedly romantic.  "Happy People" portrays  the down-to-earth survival of families in a small village (one is tempted to say "of three hundred souls") perched along the bank of the Yenisei River in the center of Siberia.  As Herzog tells us far too often, they are free and thus they are happy.  One almost expects a dancing chorus of fur-hatted lads and lasses, all singing some Russian version of Purcell's "Happy, happy, happy we!" 

We never see the burst appendices or the births gone wrong; we never hear about the need to get a villager immediate medical attention in a place you can get to only by helicopter or by boat (or, in winter, by snowmobile on the frozen Yenisei).  Nor do we hear anything about the loneliness experienced by the women and children during the long Siberian winters when the men are out trapping for months at a time.  And in Herzog's romanticized version of a life close to Nature, we certainly never hear about a trapper, alone but for his dog, who has injured himself while running his trap line and quickly becomes frozen as stiff as the sables he's been trapping.

Another weakness in the film is that Herzog apparently has never given any thought to the compromises that are critical to surviving this way of life.  The trappers do live close to Nature (Herzog always gives that word an emphatic "N"), but they all use outboard motors (complete with home made prop guards) to go up the river and its tributaries.  Each one has a dog, but they all cover their trap lines by snowmobile.  We never see a trapper tinkering with the snowmobile's engine, for example, but that would appear to be a skill necessary for survival.  There's a lot of whacking away with axes, building dead falls and testing a tree's grain for a new pair of skis, but we almost never see or hear a chain saw. 

Despite these weaknesses, the film is well worth watching.  There's a first-rate sequence on building a dugout canoe.  The footage on the dogs is great.  What Herzog has appropriated from Vasukov's four films documents the unceasing labor of surviving for a year in the Siberian taiga.  To every thing there is a season:  a season to lay in next winter's wood and to start a new cabin;  a season to grow vegetables; a season to stockpile pike to feed both the dogs and the villagers; a season to trap sable.  These villagers may be free from the government, as Herzog asserts, but their survival is dependent on doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done.  Where does one draw the line between freedom and necessity?  My sense is that they are less "happy" than quietly proud of their skillful self-reliance.

I'm even thinking about watching it once more before returning it to Netflix.  If I do, however, I'm going to mute Herzog's narration.

What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren

Cat Warren has written an engaging account of training Solo, her German shepherd, as a cadaver dog, a dog used to find the bodies of missing people.  As everyone who has ever worked with a dog knows, the hardest part of training a dog is training the owner.  At one time or another, Warren does nearly everything wrong, yet Solo not only survives her mistakes but triumphs.  Her candor about her own errors make us appreciate what Solo can accomplish all the more.  You come away from the book thinking that Solo is a great dog and that Cat Warren would be a great person to have as a friend.

Good as it is in its separate chapters, the book as a whole ultimately is unsatisfying.  I decided to read the book because of its title: What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs (Touchstone Simon & Schuster, 2013).  The problem is, not much can be said about what a dog knows and how the dog knows it--we don't even know much about how well a dog can smell.  Warren has a chapter on "Nose Knowledge," admittedly, but she's pretty much reduced to saying that little agreement exists about how and why dogs can smell so much better than humans can.  Other senses like vision get omitted.  I saw no reference, for example, to something I learned only a few years ago:  dogs see in two dimensions, not three.  Put a plywood silhouette of a dog sideways a little distance away, and a dog will assume it's another dog.  And hearing?  Nothing. What about memory?  Nothing.  But surely these are aspects of what the dog knows.  The title is thus inappropriate. 

What about the subtitle, The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs?  "Working Dogs" takes in a number of categories in addition to the cadaver and K9 dogs that Warren covers: sheep dogs, for example, and sled dogs, guard dogs, and companion dogs.  Hunting dogs might or might not come in here, along with the terrier breeds used to kill rats, and so on.  As far as What the Dog Knows is concerned, these don't exist.  The title and subtitle are marketing hype, pure and simple, and the book doesn't remotely deliver on what it promises.  A title like Solo and Me:  The Wonder and Frustrations of Training a Body Dog wouldn't have left this reader, at least, feeling he had been sold a false bill of goods.  I'd still like to know Cat Warrren.  But if I ever do meet her, the first thing I'm going to say is that she should get a new publisher.

Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear

A bit over two hundred years ago, Brillat-Savarin coined the saying, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." Today, at least for that geographically diverse and economically upwardly mobile segment of the population known as foodies, the saying would have to be, "Tell me what you want to eat, and I'll tell you who you want to be."  The subtitle of Dana Goodyear's Anything That Moves (Riverhead, 2013) both clarifies the book's subject and suggests its sweep:  Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture.

"The Making of a New American Food Culture" is of course the kind of marketing hyperbole designed to move this book off the shelf.  Inevitably, its promise falls short in actuality.  What Goodyear does talk about is the more extreme manifestations of those--a relative minority--who not only have embraced nose to tail eating but want to expand drastically their experience of what Calvin Schwabe has termed "unmentionable cuisine."  Goodyear quotes Matthew Selman's lament that there isn't a term for these seekers of gastronomic thrills:  "'I wish there was a word other than foodie,' he says.  'How about super food asshole or pretentious food jerk?'"  I'd like to suggest a term myself:  "extreme foodies," based obviously on the analogy with extreme skiers, surfers, and so on--risk-takers all.

And like extreme athletes, there are risks for extreme foodies, ranging from the relatively mild ones like drinking raw milk, to the humiliation when confronted by a bull's penis of your vomiting reflex being stronger than your desire to expand your consciousness, to the possible legal consequences of being caught eating endangered and therefore illegal mammals like whales.  As part of the interest of Anything That Moves is discovering the bizarre items people are actually willing to put in their mouths, I shan't go into more detail, except to note that Goodyear also gives examples of fearless eaters not actually getting from a renegade chef the genuine article they had paid exorbitantly for.  Caveat emptor!

In Anything That Moves, Dana Goodyear doesn't evoke the persona of the gleeful enfant terrible so characteristic of Anthony Bourdain.  She doesn't illuminate the mental and physical problems of getting food on the table, as does Michael Ruhlman in The Making of a Chef.  Nor does she write with the genial wit of Calvin Trillin.  But Goodyear has walked the reportorial walk in some out of the way side streets, and I, for one, trust her as a guide. What most impressed me is that she had the guts to write her "Coda"--and no, I'm not going to tell you about that, either.  You'll have to read the book.

Bingham's Trappers' Return: A Sentimental Journey

In 1851, six years after he painted Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, Bingham painted The Trappers' Return, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.  I hadn't known about this painting until my friend The Old Gunkie pointed it out to me.  Although he prefers it to the earlier painting, to me it's primarily interesting as a sentimental example of diminished complexity.



The composition is obviously taken from the earlier painting, but with significant omissions.  The snags are missing (the one at the downstream end of the woods may be a snag, or it may be a tree fallen from the forest).  The dead duck is gone, as are the hunting bag and rifle case.  The bear cub now has appropriately rounded ears but it is in a different position, standing upright rather than looking down its muzzle. The baggage between the bear cub and the boy has disappeared.

Nor are these changes all, for Bingham reworked what he did retain from the earlier painting.  The background of woods, cliffs, and shore is different.  The father is given a different facial expression, as is the boy.  Now, the two seem to be looking at the beholder, observers in their own turn of the audience standing where we are.

Still smoking a pipe, the fur trapper/trader now has a different cap and looks more benign, quite altered from Bingham's earlier painting and his even earlier sketch.

The boy is more changed from the earlier painting, but in a way that looks back to another of Bingham's earlier drawings.  The earlier drawing has no shooting bag or case for the rifle, as well as no duck.  If the painting of Fur Traders Descending the Missouri shows the son as bemused, this drawing, like The Trappers' Return, shows the son as slightly amused, focusing directly on the beholder.

Trying to figure out why I don't care for this version nearly as much as the earlier one, I eventually decided that this one has a flattened quality to it.  Its diminished complexity makes it more like a calendar illustration than a painting.  There's interesting light, yes; there's an interesting composition, yes; but there's no life in it.  The ripples beyond the canoe seem unimportant, with the result that even while the painting represents movement, it seems static.  All is calm as we gaze at a nostalgic scene from earlier days.  In short, the past has become a version of pastoral, and their journey has become sentimental.  It's as if Bingham painted The Trappers' Return with one hand tied behind his back:

Reading Bingham's Painting, "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri"

Doing some genealogical research on my father's side of the family has led me to see this well-known painting in a new way.  My middle name, Hutchison, comes from Nathaniel Hutchison, MD, who left Armagh, Ireland, to settle in Franklin, MO, in the early 1820's.  Today, people refer to Old Franklin and New Franklin, a distinction that puzzled me until I found out that Franklin was devastated by one of the Missouri's frequent floods in the nineteenth century and completely destroyed by a flood in the twentieth century.  Rebuilt, New Franklin is some distance away.

One of Dr. Hutchison's children, Sarah Elizabeth, married George Caleb Bingham, who in 1845 painted Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  By the mid-1840's, the fur trade was in decline.  Not only were the beaver getting trapped out, but silk hats had become fashionable in the 1830's.  The subject matter of Bingham's painting has a certain nostalgic quality:  it portrays not what you would have seen on the river in 1845 but what you would have seen a decade or two before.

In Masterpieces of American Painting (1985), Leonard Everett Fisher comments that Bingham demonstrates an "absolute control over his ideals, subject and tools": "In this everyday scene, he not only managed to express the slow flow of the river, men and boat by the obvious horizontality and simplicity of subject, he actually slows it up even further by the vertical counter-pointings (as in the cat and paddle) and by their watery reflections; and by moving the subject in a right to left direction while we few the art from left to right, our natural reading habit--especially of horizontal matter such as letters and words.  In such a fixed geometry, Bingham envelops his canvas in an atmosphere of tonal laziness and communicates eternal drift" (p. 56).

The sun appears to be getting close to the horizon, outlining the three figures from the rear and casting long shadows that terminate beyond the picture's edge.  Like the sky, the water of the Missouri seems almost limpid, reflecting the maroon trousers and the striped blue and white shirt of the boy and the red and white shirt of his father.

Yet several details undercut the serenity of this peacefully balanced scene.  (The following details I have copied from the reproduction I purchased in the Metropolitan's Museum Shop, so the color values are not identical.)  One detail that undercuts the seemingly peaceful scene is the father's expression.  In contrast to the boy's bemused smile, the father glowers in our direction.

Another unsettling detail is the duck on the bale of furs.  Quite literally a dead duck, it is lying on its back to show it was shot squarely in its breast.  Indeed, the rifle can be seen tucked under the boy's near arm, together with his rifle case and decorated shooting bag.

The most disturbing element, however, is easily overlooked, and that can only have been deliberate on Bingham's part.  Bingham makes good use of triangular elements in his composition:  the broken one formed by the canoe, the boy, and his father is echoed in the smaller one of the bale of furs, the boy's back and head, and the interrupted line to the dead duck.  The three snags protruding through the surface at first glance appear to emphasize these triangles by containing the dugout canoe.

The downstream snag lies beyond the bow, nearly parallel to it.  The upstream one is farther away and neatly reverses the angle of the stern. The remaining snag, itself an even smaller triangle, is just upstream of the boy's head.  But then a closer look reveals yet another snag, one on the far side of the canoe and almost equidistant between the two figures.

Trying to understand why my ancestor Dr. Hutchison had decided to live in Franklin, I discovered two facts.  The first was that Franklin then was the jumping off point for the Santa Fe Trail and the Rocky Mountain fur trade.  The second, emphasized in every contemporary account I read, was that the Missouri River was notorious for its deadly snags and sandbars.  Reading about those hazards reminded me of a passage in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, and after some skimming I found it in Chapter IX, "Continued Perplexities."  In this chapter, Twain describes the almost paralytic terror he experienced the first time he was given the wheel of the steamboat.  He had to confess he was incapable of reading the water, and even the experienced pilot Mr. Bixby (who knew all too well about Twain's arrogant ignorance) could not tell him how to do it--only that he would learn how to do it in time.

Mr. Bixby was correct, Twain continues, for he eventually did learn how to read the river:  "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. . . .  The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated.  It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye."

This contrast between the faint dimple on the surface and its hidden and hideous significance is central, I would argue, to Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.  It helps to account for the differences in expression between the boy and the father.  Almost too obviously, the boy is associated with innocence; the father, with experience.  As Twain declares, "In truth, the passenger who could not read this book [of the river] saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter."  To the untrained eye, Twain continues, the river presented "graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring."  That is what the eye of innocence sees and is charmed by--it is what the boy sees, and it is what critics like Fisher have described so eloquently as this painting's "atmosphere of tonal laziness" and "eternal drift."

But is that all we should see in Bingham's painting?  Surely not.  A closer, careful look will reveal that snags are everywhere.  For example, look beyond the bear cub in the bow:

In these terms, the snags enclosing the canoe suggests that the boy's carefree expression and his relaxed posture express an innocence close to foolhardiness  If his glowering father were not reading the river and guiding the canoe accordingly, not only would their furs be lost but they too would be as dead as that duck.  There's no question Bingham was aware of these dangers:  his brother had drowned in the Blackwater River, and his grandfather had drowned in the Missouri River.  The boy may be seeing all manner of pretty pictures, but what the father recognizes is altogether different. He has good reason to look grim.

Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri is a wonderful example of a painting which rewards close observation.  I therefore can only disagree with John Francis McDermott, who in his magisterial George Caleb Bingham:  River Portraitist (1959) declares that this painting "'means' nothing:  it is only a record of life" (p. 189).  No:  Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri is a record of life in the midst of potential death--and those snags are indeed threatening for those who do observe them.  Bingham has managed to have it both ways:  the painting represents a nostalgic look at a vanishing way of life, one bathed in an almost limpid light, yet, for those like Mark Twain who can read the river, it reminds us emphatically of the dangers lurking just below the surface.  It remains a masterpiece of American painting, but for reasons that art historians in their bemused innocence have missed altogether.