The Man Who Ate Everything (3 page)

Sunday, June 3.
Is that a bubble in the
chef or
a flaw in the glass of the bowl? The
chef still
smells like wet whole wheat flour, nothing more.

Monday, June 4.
The
chef has
swelled and smells tangy, somewhere between beer and yogurt! I am proud as a parent.

Tuesday, June 5.
No further change. Maybe I have failed. Maybe my
chef is
dead. But it is time for Poilane’s Step Two, doubling the earlier quantities and building the
chef
into what Poilane calls the
levain,
which you leave from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to ferment.

Wednesday, June 6, bright and early.
The thing is alive! I think it is trying to talk to me. In only twenty-four hours the
l
e
vain
has risen to the top of the bowl and is pressing up against the plastic wrap. Large bubbles proudly show themselves through the glass. There can be no doubt about it: I have created the universe in a grain of wheat!

In Step Three you build the
levain
into two pounds of bread dough, tripling its weight again by mixing it with 252 grams of water and working in 400 grams of flour and 15 grams of salt. The water brings together the two main types of protein in flour, glutenin and gliadin, and the result is gluten—the sticky, elastic substance that makes the mixture stringy and clotted.

With evidence of a happy fermentation, I shift to Giusto’s
white organic unbleached bread flour. The kneading begins, twenty long minutes of it, stretching the dough away from my body with the heel of my hand, folding it back toward me, giving the dough a quarter turn, and doing it again and again. Besides aerating the dough, this motion unkinks the protein molecules and lines them up next to each other, where they link into a network of gluten. The dough becomes satiny and elastic; as the yeast produces carbon dioxide the dough stretches and expands around the bubbles of gas rather than falling apart and letting the gases escape.

I find twenty minutes of kneading unendurable. Mine is not the attitude of a true artisan. Hand kneading puts the baker in touch with his living dough, you read, endows him with responsibility for his bread. From now on, I will switch to my KitchenAid K5A heavy-duty home mixer equipped with a dough hook. It pummels and whirls instead of kneading, but it does produce acceptable results, especially when I take over for a few minutes at the end.

Poilane tells you to let the dough rise for six to twelve hours, not the double or triple rise of yeasted dough, but a more modest 30 percent.

Seven o’clock that evening.
Through the glass the dough looks well aerated. Though it may not have risen the requisite amount, I am determined to bake it tonight, after a final rising.

Poilane is fuz
z
y on forming a round loaf, so I follow the standard procedure—flattening the dough with the smooth domed surface facedown and rolling and stretching it into a tight spherical package. I have bought a
banneton,
a professional linen-lined rising basket, from French Baking Machines in New Jersey, to replace my makeshift two-quart bowl lined with a kitchen towel. I flour it heavily and lower the loaf into it, smooth side down. Then, to create a moist, draftless environment, I inflate a large Baggie around the whole thing and tie it tightly. My loaf will rise until midnight.

I spend part of the evening in a state of wonder. The first miracle is that a handful of wheat flour contains everything needed to create the most satistying and fundamental of all foods. Then I marvel for a while about yeast. Why does the yeast that feeds on wheat produce a harmless leavening gas and appealing flavors rather than poisons? And why does wild yeast seem to do best at room temperature? Yeast was created long before rooms were. Is this a coincidence or part of Somebody’s master plan?

Last, I wonder at the role of salt. Nearly all recipes call for about 2 percent salt compared to the weight of the flour—much more and you kill the yeast and bacteria, much less and the yeast grow without restraint and exhaust themselves too soon. Salt also strengthens the gluten, keeping it elastic in the corrosive acid environment of
pain au levain
and helping the bread rise. Can it be mere chance that the chemically ideal level of salt is precisely the amount that makes bread taste best?

Midnight.
The loaf has barely budged, and I am getting worried. Better give it another two hours. My wife has already gone to bed. She sees this as a dangerous precedent. But several weeks will pass before my compulsive baking threatens to destroy the marriage.

2:00 a.m. Through the inflated Baggie I can see that the loaf has swelled by half. I have preheated the oven to 500 degrees with a thick sixteen-inch terra-cotta tile on the oven shelf and a Superstone baking cloche on top of it. This device, manufactured by Sassafras Enterprises, is an unglazed ceramic dish with a domed cover that creates something like the even, penetrating, steamy heat of a brick oven. The tile undeneath increases the stored heat in the oven and protects the bottom of the bread from burning. Elizabeth David’s
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
(Viking) has a photograph of a nearly identical baking cloche from 500
b.c.,
excavated from the Agora in Athens.

I invert the
banneton
on the fiery base of the cloche, slash the top of the loaf in a checkerboard pattern with a razor blade to
encourage a free rise in the oven—uninhibited by a prematurely hardened crust—pour a quarter cup of warm water over the loaf to create extra steam (a frightening but successful gesture I learned from
The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book),
sprinkle flour over the top for decoration, and cover with the preheated dome.

2:30 a.m. I lower the heat to 400 and uncover the bread to let it brown. It has not risen as much as I would have liked, and my slashes have become deep valleys.

3:
000
a.m. My first
pain au levain
is done! When I tap the bottom of the loaf with my forefinger, it sounds hollow, a sign that the starch has absorbed enough water to turn from hard crystals into a soft gel all the way to the center of the loaf, and that much of the remaining water has evaporated.

As I know unequivocally from both book learning and experience, bread is not at its best straight from the oven. Complex flavors develop as it cools, and if you love your bread warm, you should reheat or toast it later.

3:05
a.m.
Just this once, I will break the rule and cut off a slice of hot bread. The crust is crisp and tender; the aroma and taste are complex and nutty if
a
little bland. But my bread is overly sour, and its crumb is dense and gray. Yet I am not disappointed. Butter improves matters, as it does everything in life but one’s health, and I know that the flavor will improve by the morning. Which it does.

3:2
0
a.m.
I am falling toward slumber when my heart starts racing and a wave of dread washes over me. I forgot to hold back part of the dough as the
chef
f
or
my next loaf, the entire point of
pain au levain.
Now I must start all over again tomorrow morning.

3:21 a. m.
I can’t fall asleep. I drag myself into the kitchen and whip up a new
chef.
This time it takes two minutes, and I am confident it will work perfectly. I eat another piece of bread and sleep
contentedly. In the morning, my wife objects to crumbs on the pillow.

Thursday, June 21.
I am baking as fast as I can, six successive loaves so far—six generations—with my new
chef.
At each baking the
chef
has grown more vigorous and its flavor more assertive but a bit less acidic. My wife feels that my baking schedule has prevented us from going away on sunny summer weekends. She says it is like having a newborn puppy without the puppy. She has always wanted a puppy.

She is also unhappy that every surface in the apartment has a delicate dusting of Giusto’s bread flour. But it is only when I nearly turn down tickets to the Madonna concert for fear that Madonna will interfere with my first rising that she puts her foot down. I refrigerate the dough overnight, as I’ve done with other breads, and find that the final flavor has, if anything, improved. But my bread is still too dense, and I do not know what to do about it.

Tuesday, July 31.
I throw myself upon the mercy of experts. Noel Comess left the post of chef de cuisine at the Quilted Giraffe four years ago, at the age of twenty-eight, to start the Tom Cat Bakery in an abandoned ice-cream factory in Queens, and his sourdough
boule
is the best in the city. He agrees to let me snoop around one evening. His room temperature is 85 degrees, much warmer than Poilane’s, and the proportion of old risen dough to new at each stage is less than I have learned to use. I watch him form several loaves and realize that beating down the dough is the last thing naturally leavened bread needs. The gas bubbles are our friends. We pore over his books. Noel loves baking bread and the continuous, self-renewing process of
pain au levain,
in which nothing is ever wasted.

Back home I round my loaves more gently and find that they bake higher and with a more varied texture. But they still look like my bread, not like Noel’s. A warmer rising temperature
sometimes helps and sometimes doesn’t. And my
chef is
simply not active enough to use the proportions that Noel does.

I turn to Michael London. From 1977 to 1986 Michael and his wife, Wendy, ran a patisserie in Saratoga Springs, New York, called Mrs. London’s Bake Shop—Craig Claiborne once compared their creations favorably to Wittamer’s in Brussels and Peltier’s in Paris—and now from the makeshift kitchen of their Federal-period brick farmhouse in nearby Greenwich they run the Rock Hill Bakehouse, where they bake three times a week. I cannot count the mornings I have rushed down to Balducci’s or over to the Greenmarket to buy a giant loaf of Michael’s Farm Bread before it all disappears.

An unstable and sweltering little plane carries me to upstate New York. I am bearing my latest loaf of bread and a Baggie filled with four ounces of
chef.
Avis refuses to rent me a car on the flimsy pretext that my driver’s license has expired. Who has time to renew one’s license, I ask, when the dough may overrise while I am waiting on line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau and later collapse in the oven? I lose the argument, but an hour’s taxi ride costs little more than Avis’s typically inflated charges. I arrive at the Londons’ farm in late afternoon.

Michael and Wendy critique the loaf I have brought. Then we eat it with butter from their cow. Their percipient and blond seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, loves my bread.

I watch Michael make his
levain,
and he shows me how to invigorate my starter. As you build the dough from one stage to the next, the
chef,
the
levain,
and the dough should always be used just at the peak of their activity. We sleep for a few hours, wake at one in the morning, make a ton of dough, sleep until five, when his four helpers arrive, and begin shaping loaves for the final bake.

Michael builds my four ounces of strengthened starter into
levain—
and then into twenty pounds of dough. He bakes several loaves with it, and they look just like Michael’s other breads, not like mine at all. The secrets, it seems, lie in the baker’s hands, his
art and intuition, not just in the bacterial composition of the air, the flour, or the grapes. A fantastically expensive professional French hearth oven does not hurt either.

Thursday, September 6.
My baking schedule has become less frenzied, twice a week now, and my wife eagerly awaits the finished product. My
chef is
happy and strong and aromatic, the man from UPS has got used to lugging fifty-pound bags from Giusto’s every week or two, and I have vacuumed most of the organic bread flour out of my word processor. Most days the bread is more than good enough to eat, and some days it is so, good that we eat nothing else.

November 1990