Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Lately I’ve been making sourdough rolls. They’re almost as quick as yeast rolls, and almost as easy. It occurs to me that those of you who might like to get started with sourdough artisan breads, but who are concerned about the work and risk of “total bread failure” involved, might want to make sourdough rolls as a low-risk way of getting started.
I hope to make a video soon on quick-‘n’-easy sourdough rolls.
I know I’ve blogged about vegetarian (vegan actually) hot dogs before. Every now and then you’ve got to have one. Last night’s supper on the deck, near the grill, we called “heritage night.” The heritage here, of course, is Southern white trash heritage.
The vegan hot dogs come in a can. They’re made by Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist company. The chili is homemade, using vegan burger that comes in a can, also made by Loma Linda. The hot dog buns are made by a local commercial bakery. The steak fries are from Ore-Ida.
That should take care of the hot dog craving for a couple of months.
I had lunch today with my brother at Jim’s Grill in Boonville, North Carolina. He ordered a Carolina Burger. The waitress didn’t know what that is, so he defined it for her. A Carolina Burger is a hamburger dressed like a hot dog — slaw, onions, hot dog chili, and mustard. The more usual hamburger treatment in these parts would be lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and onion.
Jim’s Grill is an old roadside cafe that has been in business at least since the 1950s. Back then, it was a hot spot for teenagers. These days you’ll see no young people. The parking lot was full today with old people who had come for lunch.
As I have gotten more and more experienced with sourdough bread, two factors have converged to pull me into breadmaking even deeper. Watch out. It could happen to you, too.
For one, the sourdough baker becomes so obsessed with the quality of the bread and takes such pride in each loaf that the amount of time and work involved is no longer an issue.
For two, it’s difficult to find stone-ground whole wheat flour these days. Partly, I suspect, this is because of the demonization of gluten (and therefore wheat) by so many “gluten free” people. Whole Foods now carries all sorts of exotic (and, in my opinion, useless) flours, and that’s crowding out good wheat flour. Organic wheat berries, however, are easy to buy in bulk, and they’re cheap.
My Champion juicer, fitted with Champion’s grinder attachment, makes a somewhat slow but entirely workable wheat grinder. The flour is excellent. Later this week I hope to have a portrait of my first home-ground loaf.
Update: The bread rose poorly and did not make a portrait-worthy loaf, probably because the weather was so cold. However, it was delicious.
Up until recently, my philosophy on sourdough bread was influenced chiefly by Peter Reinhart (The Bread Baker’s Apprentice) and Michael Pollan (Cooked). While looking at reviews of cookbooks on Amazon, I came across this book by Lisa Rayner, Wild Bread: Handbaked Sourdough Artisan Breads in Your Own Kitchen. The book has definitely changed my philosophy of sourdough.
Technically, the main difference in Rayner’s approach is that she uses more starter. She builds up her starter with three successive feedings before mixing her dough. The starter provides nearly half of the total weight of the loaf.
But there is another difference in her philosophy of bread that is more subtle but very important. Pollan and Reinhart are city folk. Their references for bread are the sophisticated professional bakers that you find in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Whereas Rayner is much more rustic, more provincial, in her approach to bread. Provincial is good.
When good cooks ask me what my chief influences as a cook are, I name three: traditional Southern cooking as practiced by my mother’s mother, whose kitchen was supplied by a good-size farm; my eighteen years in California and my love for California cuisine as exemplified by Alice Waters; and hippy cuisine.
What’s hippy cuisine? Remember The Tassajara Bread Book? It was originally published in 1970. All through the 1970s, hippies were developing a new, healthier, more vegetarian cuisine. Think of Moosewood Cookbook (1977), or The Findhorn Family Cookbook (1976). In my opinion, these three very different approaches to cooking fuse very well. Wild Bread was published in 2009, but there is something very 1970s hippy-esque about it.
The first loaf of bread I made after reading Rayner’s method was just what I aim for — inherently and un-obviously sophisticated yet extremely countrified and rustic. As I said to Ken, the bread that Frodo and Bilbo ate in the shire was probably like that. In my imagination, at least, it’s what a loaf of bread might have been like a thousand years ago. Bread with that ancient quality just cannot be done with yeast. Only sourdough will do it. And, paradoxically, such a rustic bread can be achieved only with some hard-to-learn techniques and things that many kitchens don’t have — a baker’s peel, a baking stone, durum flour for dusting, and so on. One of those tools, unfortunately, is a steam oven.
I have very rarely bought wine just because I liked the label. But when I saw this chardonnay at Trader Joe’s, I laughed out loud at the label and bought a bottle.
It’s a so-so chardonnay, barely worth the price at $8.99. It’s a blend of grapes from three counties — Sonoma (63 percent), Napa (20 percent) and Monterey (17 percent). That’s an entirely agreeable blend of California chardonnay regions, but still the wine falls short.
Another thing that fascinates me about this wine is the word cotillion. That’s a type of country dance, of course, similar to a quadrille. Our American square dance is a quadrille (and therefore a cotillion), I believe. In fact the word quadrille relates to squareness and the number four. Apparently the word quadrille fascinated Lewis Carroll, since he wrote the poem “The Lobster Quadrille” for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
As for the word cotillion, it comes to English from a French word, cotillon, which means petticoat. An unabridged French dictionary says that cotillon also refers to party novelties such as confetti and streamers. Another French dictionary, tout en français, (the abbey has lots of dictionaries) defines cotillion thus: Divertissement composé de danses et de jeux avec accessoires (chapeaux, serpentins, confettis, etc.) et qui clôt le bal. So cotillion is the precise word for what the animals are doing in the label. They’re winding up the barnyard ball with a wild dance with festive accessories.
These days I’ll take a laugh anywhere I can get it. Though at the moment (9:22 p.m.) it’s time to switch to some serious port.
Plans are in for a big garden for 2017. Last fall, Ken fed the garden with generous quantities of organic soil amendments, then planted cover crops. The abbey’s garden soil has been pure organic dynamite for years, but this year it should be better than ever.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has been our source for garden seeds for years. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a good job of saving seeds from year to year, so that’s something we need to work on.
Each year we learn. For example, as much as everyone loves broccoli and cauliflower, the climate here is such that cool-weather crops like broccoli bolt too soon, without ever forming heads. We end up wasting a lot of garden space and effort on broccoli and cauliflower. Cabbage, however, does fine. This year we’ll do more herbs — basil as always, but also parsley and cilantro.
Here’s hoping that 2017’s weather will make it a good gardening year. Last year was terrible. There were long spells of hot, dry weather that were devastating to gardens. We can deal with the heat, but not with drought.
The abbey’s chocolate budget is pretty high. Though desserts are far from a regular thing, there’s always dark chocolate after supper — the good kind, organic chocolates from Whole Foods, usually 70 percent and above. If the chocolate runs low before I make a Whole Foods run, then some sort of emergency chocolate is necessary. A morsel or two of chocolate after supper is de rigeur. Not to mention an addiction. Preferably with port.
These double-chocolate cookies, from a New York Times recipe, are my current candidate for emergency chocolate. The goal is to keep the chocolate hit high and the calorie hit low. Just keep some dark chocolate chips (or discs) on hand, and cocoa, obviously, and you’re good for making emergency chocolate.
The recipe makes just over two pounds of cookie dough, so I bake half of it at a time and leave the rest of the dough in the refrigerator.
The weather Friday was perfect (67 degrees F, quite a change from the polar vortex a week ago), so we had Simple Friday rather than Simple Saturday this week.
Why is cooking and eating outdoors so much fun? In any case, I’m starting to get the hang of cooking on the firebox. I’d kill for a brick-made outdoor range, with an oven for baking bread. Ken spent most of the day working on a second chicken house. There will be photos of that soon.
When I lived in San Francisco, it was easy to buy good port, with lots of options. Much of it came from California. But, here in the provinces, the city liquor stores don’t carry port. If the grocery stores have it, it is almost always cheap brands that are not safe for septic tanks, let alone for drinking.
Trader Joe’s has come to the rescue with an Evenus port in half bottles, at $9.99. I suspect that this was bottled especially for Trader Joe’s. Evenus usually labels their ports with the type of grape (for example, syrah, or zinfandel) and a year. This port is labeled “Port Dessert Wine,” as though it’s meant for a market in which people don’t really know what port is, or even that it’s a dessert wine. No matter. It’s a superb little bottle of port.
Sometimes when I’m admiring the recipes and food photos at the New York Times web site, I marvel at how many dessert recipes there are. Do people really make, and eat, so many desserts? Here at the abbey, pies and cakes and pastries are rare. One way of cutting down on dessert consumption is to always keep a good stock of dark chocolates for after dinner. Nothing goes better with chocolate than a wee glass of port. Calories saved!