52 Loaves (39 page)

Laurie Abkemeier, “Petit” Ali Adimou, Rob Alexander,
fr ère
Michael Bozell, Mike Dooley and Bay State Milling, Jessica Dugan, Gary Edwards and Lallemand, Inc., Jack Fuchs, Brother Dominic Garramone, Steve Kaplan, Alan Kraut, Don Lewis, Stuart Moss, John Pelella, Clotaire Rapaille, Peter Reinhart, Chuck and Karen Rogalski, Ed Sears, Charlie van Over and Priscilla Martel, Nina White of Bobolink Dairy, Kevin Wright, and the late Erle Zuill of Jones Farm. I wish I knew his name, but thanks to the TSA Official who allowed my
levain
onto the plane to Paris (he didn’t have to do that). Of course, this project wouldn’t have been possible without the unwavering support of my family, Anne, Katie, and Zach, who ate the bread and (more difficult) endured the baker, week after week, without complaining about either.

A special thanks to my editor, the immensely talented Amy Gash, whose skilled hands were indispensible to the final shaping of these fift y-two loaves, the entire Algonquin creative, production, and publicity teams, and my literary agent, Liz Darhansoff.

Finally, an extra special thanks to
fr ères
Bruno Lutz, Pierre Chopin, and Jean-Charles Nault and to the entire community of l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille. May God bless them.

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That is, the weight of the bread books on my shelf, not the weight of the shelf itself.

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An alternative theory is that some dough was left out too long in the sun, and wild yeast naturally present in the flour made the dough rise. I prefer my version.

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By contrast, the Turkmen word for bread is more recent, having been changed in 2006 to the name of the ruler’s mother, Gurbansoltanedzhe.

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Coincidentally creating a nice little cottage industry for the monasteries that make Communion wafers to this day. One French abbey produces 22 million of them a year.

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Th at being that case, I guess I need to mention that my first book, an irreverent gardening memoir titled
The $64 Tomato,
had come out the previous year.

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Milk was a luxury food; the experiment became possible only when Goldberger obtained federal funding for the extra milk.

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I was simulating this action at home in a minor way by baking the loaves directly on a preheated pizza stone, which provided some thermal mass and conducted heat to the loaf more efficiently and evenly than would a baking sheet.

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But not before making another observation startlingly similar to one of my own. Producing a sperm sample, however, was a more delicate matter in seventeenth-century Holland than in twentieth-century New York, so Leeuwenhoek was careful to note that he had obtained his “without sinfully defiling myself” (I confess I had no such compunction myself), rushing his sample to the microscope “before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” leaving his wife no doubt unsatisfied, but giving the world its first valuable clue about the mysterious reproductive process.

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No, not
that
Heloise! I mean Heloise Ledbedder down the street, our neighborhood busybody (and my alter ego). This question was actually asked of Heloise the syndicated columnist (March 7, 1990), but to print it I’d have to pay a fee, and frankly, I’ve given her enough money (see
The $64 Tomato,
p. 96). Besides, all she said in her answer to this question was to freeze the bread. You want the science, you come to me.

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An actual statistic, by the way—can you believe it’s that low?

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Kids, don’t try this at home. Mere possession of an Erlenmeyer flask is a drug offense in some states.

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So how does Lallemand go from almost nothing to 3.5 million pounds of yeast in six days? Because the growth is exponential. For example, start with a mere hundredth of an ounce of yeast. In four hours it doubles to 0.02 oz.; aft er eight hours it doubles again to 0.04 oz. At the end of the first day, it’s doubled six times to yield a modest 0.64 oz. Aft er another day, though, you’re up to 40 oz. Now the numbers start rising fast: day three yields 164 pounds; day four, 10,000 pounds; and by the beginning of day six, when the yeast has doubled thirty-one times, that original hundredth of an ounce has grown to over
1 million
pounds.

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The other reason for proofing dry active yeast is to “prove” it is still active and not just dry.

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That other stuff, like specifying the rights of the king’s subjects and the writ of habeas corpus, could wait until 1215.

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Or [cough] read it in a memoir.

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Lest I be accused of cheating, let me point out that I also made a loaf of peasant bread this week, although the less said about it the better.

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I googled him.

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Although the terms are synonymous, bakers tend to stay away from the term
sourdough
because of its connotation of San Francisco sourdough, which is a unique, rather sour variety of sourdough and is not representative of most starters.

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Veneration of icons is a practice strongly associated with the Eastern Orthodox church and rarely found in Catholicism.

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Technically, the
autolyse
is done before yeast and salt are added, so the resting time isn’t critical (unless you’re baking for Passover), but since my dough had plenty of
levain,
with its active yeast cultures, I figured I might as well add the remaining ingredients before the
autolyse.
At the least, I wouldn’t forget to add them later.

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Fortified
refers to the addition of nutrients in levels higher than found in the unprocessed, natural form of the food. Thus milk is “fortified” with vitamin D, while flour is “enriched.”

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Yes, that says “Wonder Bread” for assuring sexual satisfaction.

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The passage from this ancient Hindu scripture is said to have been the inspiration for the title of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel
The Razor’s Edge.

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If the reader is wondering whether that sentence means that I don’t always have sex on my mind, or means that the fact that I always have sex on my mind wasn’t to blame—keep wondering.

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Disappointingly, not in a tux, as we were in Tuxedo Park, which actually is the source of the eponymous suit.

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Totally astounding to me until Zach explained he’d just seen a community production.

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The mill is actually never dark and empty.

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Graham, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and advocate of vegetarianism, temperance, and abstinence, also advised that ketchup and mustard cause friskiness, leading to insanity; self-gratification results in blindness, paralysis, and senility; chicken pie causes cholera; and white bread promotes promiscuity. He developed graham flour, a whole wheat flour in which the bran is ground more finely than the endosperm, to promote health and abstinence. Your correspondent, in severe need of libido reduction this week, can report, having baked a loaf of graham bread, some success. Modesty (that is, my wife) prohibits me from elaborating, but before you rush off to buy libido-depressing graham crackers for your spouse (or teenager), note that Nabisco “original” graham crackers are made today with white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and soy leci-thin. The thought of that alone is enough to depress one’s libido.

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Some potentially dangerous confusion here: I was ready to fill my hole with Upper West Siders I’d recruited from a New York City Starbucks before I realized Kiko had totally redefined an established word.

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Last time I saw it, it was still in the corner of the porch.

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These listed percentages are of the milled white flour; the protein levels of the whole wheat berry are a fraction to a full percentage point higher, as the bran is high in protein.

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France was not alone; Italy suff ered a similar decline and is undergoing a similar renaissance of its artisan bread.

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The flour in a typical loaf of commercial bread accounts for less than twenty cents of the price; the remainder comes from manufacturing, packing, transportation, and marketing.

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It turns out I’m not alone: some Middle Eastern experts are predicting that Morocco may become the next battleground of Islamic fundamentalism.

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In later versions the house is sometimes built of candy.

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This is a common phenomenon in France, and I later witnessed in person this technique that the French use to sound accommodating and helpful on the phone when in fact they are being obstinate and very
un
helpful. What they do is smile from the moment they pick up the phone until they put it down, which makes the voice cheerful and friendly, regardless of the actual content of the conversation.

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My 500-word French vocabulary increased to 501 during this trip when I learned that a
fournil
is where the bread is baked; a
boulangerie
is a shop where bread is sold (and possibly baked as well).

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When writing
The Italian Baker
in 1985, Carol Field noted that there was not a single cookbook in Italy devoted to bread making at home—but thirty-five thousand commercial bakers supplying the bread.

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The fact that either of these men even considered this issue is in itself illustrative of the differences between France and the United States, where such a thing would, unfortunately, never be given a nanosecond of thought.

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I’d switched from cornmeal, as rice flour makes less of a mess in the oven.

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Of which I had only the precious small amount I’d ground in week 37. Having come to the conclusion that the Indians would take back Manhattan before I finished grinding all my wheat with their old grindstone, I’d had half the remaining wheat milled at Bay State and the other half stone-ground in a gas-powered portable stone mill at a farm festival.

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In fairness to FD, I should point out that we were able to obtain a replacement window for a reasonable price.

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Which is a shame; it made writing term papers so much easier.