Best Food Writing 2014 (25 page)

Then, there are the smells. There's the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I'm-on-my-way-smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness
that has suddenly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven, turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. Bread is best seen in cross-section, and each cross-section is different. Each bread has a beautifully different weight and crumb as the knife cuts into it. The
pain Poilâne
style almost squeaks as you cut into it, the sourdough, or levain, that gives it that nice acid bite seeming to protest under the knife; the bagel's firmer flesh is made less resistant by that hole; the broissants crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch, the many layers you fold into the puff pastry turning into a house of a hundred floors under your command. And greed can sometimes lead you to tear off the end of the softer breads, in a gesture satisfying in itself, even before you bite. (And if all this sounds a touch Freudian for a man baking with his mother, well, the Oedipal dramas we enter knowingly leave us better sighted, not blind.)

As one project followed another, I realized why I had not been drawn to bread baking in the first place. Stovetop cooking is, at a first approximation, peeling and chopping onions and then crying; baking is mixing yeast and water with flour and then
waiting
. The difference between being a baker and being a cook is whether you find waiting or crying more objectionable. Waiting is anathema to me, and activity is essential to my nature—a nature I share with my mother. But then it occurred to me that my mom is that anomalous creature: an impatient baker. She fills the gaps created by enforced waiting by being active, so that each bread, as we put it down to wait for it to rise, was succeeded by another bread in need of mixing or punching or rolling. The kitchen of my childhood had filled up with bread as she waited for the rest of the bread to be ready.

On Monday morning, I packed the loaves and broissants and bagels in my overnight bag. I would take them home to study and share with my own children. I gave my mother a hug. “It's such fun to bake with you, dear,” she said. “Of course, I spent years making you bread every morning. We always had croissants and muffins and—oh, dear, I
always
had so many things out for you.”

Was there, after all these years, a just discernible note of exasperation, a regretful sense that her children's appetites were not equal to their bafflement at her avidity? I realized that I had never once thanked her for all that bread. On the long drive to the airport and
the short flight to LaGuardia, with all her bread in my bag, I reflected that the thank-yous we do say to our parents, like the ones I hear from my own kids now—our over-cheery “Great to see you!”s and “We'll catch you in October!”s; our evasive “Christmas would be great! Let's see how the kids are set up”—are never remotely sufficient, yet we feel constrained against saying more. (We end phone conversations by saying “Love you!” to our parents; somehow, adding the “I” seems too . . . schmutzy, too filled with wild yeast from the hidden corners of life, likely to rise and grow unpredictably.) We imagine that our existence is thank-you enough.

Children always reinterpret their parents' sense of obligation as compulsion. It's not
They did it for me
but
They did it because they wanted to
. She wanted to bake that bread; you told those bedtime stories every night, really, for yourself. There'd be no surviving without that move, the debt guilt would be too great to shoulder. In order to supply the unique amount of care that children demand, we have to enter into a contract in amnesia where neither side is entirely honest about the costs. If we ever totted up the debt, we would be unable to bear it. Parents who insist on registering the asymmetry accurately (the Jewish mother in a Roth novel, the Japanese father in an Ozu film) become objects of frantic mockery or, at best, pity for their compulsiveness. “All I do is give and give and what reward do I get? You never call!” the Jewish mother moans in the novel, and we laugh and laugh, and she is right—she
did
give and give, and we
don't
call. She is wrong only to say it out loud. In the market of emotions, that sacrifice is already known, and discounted for, as the price of life.

When I got back to New York, Martha was at last ready to make her bread. She had found the right kind of earthenware bowl, and the right kind of wooden board, and even the right kind of counter scraper. After my weekend with my mother, I offered to show her how to use the dough hook on the Sunbeam, but she looked at me darkly. “My kind of bread isn't made in an electric mixer,” she said.

“There's a certain aesthetic to baking my bread,” she went on. “Everything has to be clean and nice.” She had, I noted, put on a black leotard and tights for the occasion, so that she looked like a Jules Feiffer heroine. She mixed together all the good natural ingredients—the brown flour and the millet and the organic honey—and
then laid a length of white linen over the earthenware bowl. “It's not a sweet bread, but it has sweetness in it,” she explained.

At last, in the silent kitchen, the dough had risen, and we all gathered around to watch. Her kneading startled her family. She kneaded in a domestic fervor, a cross between Betty Crocker and a bacchante. There was no humming mixer, just a woman and her dough. Then she began to braid three long rolls of dough together, expertly.

“Mom, this is, like, such a
big
bread,” our fourteen-year-old said. “It's like bread you would bring to Jesus.”

It was, too. And suddenly, crystal through the years, I saw Martha at nineteen, on one of those bitter, beautiful Canadian mornings, eyes turned almond by the cold, fur hat on and high collar up, carrying . . . a braided loaf, in a basket, tied with a shiny purple ribbon. She
had
baked bread, this very bread, and brought it to me, too. And it had been lost in the family kitchen, surrounded by too many croissants and sticky buns and too many chattering and devouring mouths.

“You brought a loaf like this over to my house!” I said. “I see it now. But I can't remember how it tasted.” It was an anti-Proustian Proustian moment: memory flooded back in the presence of something that I had forgotten to eat.

“Of course not,” she said. “No one noticed. It was just, ‘Oh, how nice! Put it there.' I don't think you even ate any. Your mother's whole French thing was so different. It overwhelmed my loaf. I think it was the last time I made my bread.”

When it was baked, sixty minutes in a slow oven, her loaf looked beautiful, braided like the blond hair of a Swedish child. The next day, I buttered a slice of it, delicious and long-deferred toast, and had it with my coffee. As toast always will, it seemed morning-bright, and clean of complications. Women, I thought, remember everything. Bread forgives us all.

“S
top making cookies.”

I'm sorry, what was that dear?

“I said,
stop making cookies.
”

That's odd,
I thought to myself.
Why would she be saying that? Wouldn't any wife be pleased to be married to a husband who fills the house with the aroma of warm butter, caramelized sugar, and gooey chocolate? Indeed, wouldn't any human being in their right mind
yearn
to be constantly surrounded by sweet, crisp-and-chewy snacks?

Then, as I glanced around the apartment, wiping chocolate-specked hands against my apron, running a finger across the countertop and tracing a line into the dusting of white powder that coated every surface in the kitchen, eyeing the dozens of bags of failed experimental cookies that blocked the television, opening the refrigerator door to discover that more than half of its contents were batches of uncooked cookie dough in various stages of rest, I thought,
maybe she
does
have a point.

For the past few months, I've had chocolate chip cookies on the brain. I wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea, a new test to run, only to discover that my 10 pound flour bin has been emptied for the third time. Did I really use it all up that fast? I'd put on my coat and walk out in the cold New York winter night, my sandals leaving tracks in the snow as I wander the neighborhood, an addict searching for a convenience store that will sell me flour at 3 in the morning.

You see, I've
never
been able to get a chocolate chip cookie exactly the way I like. I'm talking chocolate cookies that are barely crisp around the edges with a buttery, toffee-like crunch that transitions into a chewy, moist center that bends like caramel, rich with butter and big pockets of melted chocolate. Cookies with crackly, craggy tops and the complex aroma of butterscotch. And of course, that elusive perfect balance between sweet and salty.

Some have come close, but none have quite hit the mark. And the bigger problem?
I was never sure what to change in order to get what I want
. Cookies are fickle and the advice out there is conflicting. Does more sugar make for crisper cookies? What about brown versus white? Does it matter how I incorporate the chocolate chips or whether the flour is blended in or folded? How about the butter: cold, warm, or melted?

So many questions to ask and answers to explore! I made it my goal to test each and every element from ingredients to cooking process, leaving no chocolate chip unturned in my quest for the best. 32 pounds of flour, over 100 individual tests, and 1,536 cookies later, I had my answers.

How Cookies Crumble

Most traditional chocolate chip cookie recipes start with the same basic ingredients and technique: butter and sugar (a mix of white and brown) are creamed together with a touch of vanilla until fluffy, eggs are beaten in one at a time, followed by flour, salt, and some sort of chemical leavening (baking soda, baking powder, or a bit of both). The mixture is combined just until it comes together, then spooned onto a baking sheet and baked.

When you bake a cookie, here's what's going on, step-by-step.

       
•
   
The dough spreads:
. As the butter warms, it slackens. The cookie dough begins to turn more liquid and gradually spreads out.

       
•
   
The edges set:
As the cookie spreads, the edges thin out. This, coupled with the fact that they are fully exposed to the heat of the oven and are constantly reaching hotter areas of the baking pan, causes them to begin to set long before the center of the cookie does.

       
•
   
The cookie rises:
As the butter melts and the cookie's structure loosens, this frees up water, which in turn dissolves baking soda. This baking soda is then able to react with the acidic components of brown sugar, creating gases that cause the cookies to rise up and develop a more open interior structure.

       
•
   
Egg proteins and starches set:
Once they get hot enough, egg proteins and hydrated starches will begin to set in structure, finalizing the shape and size of the finished cookie.

       
•
   
Sugar caramelizes:
At its hottest areas—the edges and the underbelly in direct contact with the baking dish—sugar granules melt together, turning liquidy before starting to caramelize and brown, producing rich, sweet flavors.

       
•
   
The Maillard reaction occurs:
Proteins in the flour and the eggs brown along with the sugar in a process called the Maillard reaction—the same reaction responsible for giving your hamburger or bread a brown crust. It produces nutty, savory, toasted flavors.