ciabatta

Last night I completed my first real bread baking project. I've baked bread before, sure, lots of times, but this was different. This was real freakin bread, with a 2-day process and some sophisticated techniques involved. The results, I have to say, are amazing:


^^^an actual picture of the actual bread I actually baked^^^

When I opened the oven and took out these loaves, I couldn't believe that I actually baked them. They looked like something they were selling in some store I avoid because their prices are (deservedly, for the most part) too high. They smelled incredible. I've never smelled a more satisfying aroma.

What was so different was that they were made from a Biga that had been allowed to ferment in my refrigerator for 2 full days. It's a bit odd to make a batch of bread dough, complete with rising and everything, throw it in the refrigerator for a day, then cut it up and add it to essentially a whole new batch of bread as an ingredient. It works, though. Can't argue with results. I used the recipe for ciabatta in The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

This book and I, we have a spotted past together, to say the least. I've trifled with its bacon cornbread recipe twice now, and regretted it twice. It's not a good recipe. I baked some raisin bread out of there, as well, and it was pretty good, but not stellar. The ciabatta is stellar. I tasted just a bit last night (there was a bit of dangling crust), and it was truly great. I don't usually get too excited about bread, but this is exciting.

Lord help me, I may start doing it more often. I still cringe while remembering how it took me 4.5 combined hours of waiting and dough manipulation after work yesterday, on top of the Biga preparation 2 days before, to say nothing of the part where my kitchen was covered in flour and I still have a ton of cleanup to do, but I know (even though it's painful to contemplate) that I'll be back doing it soon.

Fat, or what the real world already knows about food.

I was reading this Bruni review today in the NYT, in which Bruni pretends he's never eaten any real food. Newsflash, dude: while the elevated ranks of restauranteurs, the people who supposedly define what good food is, were busy making little swirls of sauce on a plate with squirt bottles and dusting cylindrical piles of watercress with fish eggs, the rest of the world was still eating whole pigs, bacon, pie crust made with lard, and bone marrow. Real food exists outside of the realm of the gourmand. All sorts of food just keeps on keeping on all over the world, and it's good. It doesn't take Thomas keller deciding to bastardize and sell it for it to be good, it just takes putting it in your mouth. There might be a little less foie gras and truffle oil in it before it goes in someone's mouth, but maybe that's not a bad thing, mmkay? How long before they're serving gravy burgers in NY? Chefs are "discovering" all the stuff everybody eats and claiming it as their own, just like Columbus "discovered" the New World. It's all so...colonial. I have no problem with food migrating out of different venues, or even with chefs making traditional recipes their own, but it seems silly to pretend it's all new and different when it's just the same food that people have been eating since back before they invented Crisco.

10 Reasons to Buy Local Food

Anyone who enjoys good food (you know who you are) should check out this fact sheet:
10 Reasons to Buy Local Food

Now if only they would publish a list of ways to get the local food without paying through the nose, and a list of ways to get your local government to stop zoning farmland into McMansion plantations (of course step 1 on both those lists would be to buy more locally grown food...)

Kid Chow

There's a good article in the NYT today about menus for kids in most restaurants nowadays. David Kamp discussed the ubiquity and tastelessness of most "kid food," both points I agree with. Why should kids be fed some flavorless pabulum instead of real food that is every bit as good as what adults get? Admittedly, a lot of adults go to restaurants and order the least adevnturous and most boring item on the menu, but for those who know better, it is painful to watch your kids choose something pathetic and tasteless while you've carefully selected a mind-expanding taste treat. My strategy has been to make sure they know what I'm eating (not always an incentive to order adventurously, since that means they witness me eating pork hocks and coagulated duck blood at the Vietnamese place we like), and to try to encourage them to at least think about the fact that the place has dishes unusual enough to trigger their fear of the exotic.

Part of the problem not covered in the article is that school lunches suck. Kids are fed worse food at school than anything ever served to me by the lunch lady. Their chow is of poor quality, of unknown nutritional value, presented in an institutional manner, but with condescendingly cute names like Zany Jungle Chicken, meaning that after it was defrosted, they sloshed a spoonful of high fructose corn syrup with imitation pineapple flavoring onto it. The main difference between these horrifying meals and what kids are served at restaurants is that the restaurant does a slightly better job of preparing and presenting it, sometimes going so far as dumping it all into a cardboard box shaped like a car or something. Couldn't we make school lunches a bit better? Raise the level on quality, preparation, etc? Food has a major impact on society. Many of the US's problems with energy, the economy, and healthcare are all about food. Maybe food would be less of a problem if we taught kids that it was important from the time they entered public school by demonstrating that it's important. If kids got used to eating good food, they would demand it when they got to a restaurant, and they would demand it as adults. They would take some steps to secure a strong supply of good food, steps that should have been taken 30, 40, and 50 years ago.

An interesting question to ask, ala Freakonomics, would be whether exposure to a variety of different foods early in life leads to adventurous eating habits as an adult. I don't have very specific career hopes for my kids, merely that they do something that they enjoy doing, but I do want for them to grow up recognizing and appreciating good food. I want them to shed what I assume are juvenile hangups about spices, strong flavors, and other (in my opinion) silly artificial sensibilities. I don't think that making kids eat crazy stuff would accomplish that, but I don't think that giving them the opportunity to try will hurt, either.

Here is my proposal, modest as its influence (nobody, essentially) may be: instead of having a kids' menu, offer child-sized portions of all the adult food. Worst case: they eat the least adventurous item on the menu and complain about it. Best case: you create a lifetime fan of your food and expand the horizons of a young diner.