Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

What irony to finish a book about families that leave their homes, spouses, relatives, languages, foods, and often their children for the dream of coming to America on the same day that the President of the United States signed an executive order forbidding any foreigners (except important laborers supported by business interests) from crossing our borders. Jason DeParle personalizes global migration by following three generations of a Philippino family he has lived with and befriended for more than 30 years. No country has adopted the export of its citizens with more national zeal and national policy than the Philippines, supplying many of the world's nurses, ship hands, and laborers, both skilled and unskilled. The remittances of emigres fuel the Philippine economy. But that is macro economics. Micro economics becomes painful as DeParle follows his friends as they battle homesickness and isolation in order to make enough money to lift families from shanty-dwelling poverty....

Peter Reinhart  is an award winning baker, author, and instructor. He is also one of the nicest and most supportive baker/author/instructors I've ever met. Reinhart is native of New York City, so when he set out to make authentic New York Deli Rye he recalled from his youth, he knew what he was looking for. The key ingredient, as laid out in The Bread Baker's Apprentice , are a pair of onions, cooked in oil until they just begin to turn translucent. The onions are mixed with sourdough starter and left to infuse for about a day before the full dough is assembled, kneaded, and baked. After the final bake, the onion shards have largely disappeared -- you can see a few darkened specks in the crust -- but they leave behind a subtle, pervasive aroma and characteristic flavor that will send you immediately to the store for corned beef, pastrami, and some grainy mustard. Don't forget a sour pickle. During the day I was letting the onions and rye sourdough culture do th...

I'll be honest. I didn't finish reading. Yes, it is a best seller with a waitlist of 22 weeks on Libby. The Secrets we Kept is based upon the true story of two American secretaries at the CIA who during the height of the Cold War smuggled Boris Pasternak's magnum opus, Doctor Zhivago , out of the Soviet Union. The Russians wouldn't publish it. The CIA's intent was to break the hearts and minds of Soviet citizens by sneaking the published book of Russia's most beloved poet back into the USSR. The CIA hoped to prove that an open society (The West) that celebrated literature was superior to a closed one (The East) that sent its poets and writers, or in this case, Pasternak's muse and mistress, off to the Gulag. Only, the fictionalized retelling is less interesting, and frankly less credible, than the truth. The CIA's secretaries bridal beneath male chauvinism with 21st century sensibilities, expressing dismay that would not have been publicly voiced f...

Matilde Simpkin is a larger-than-life veteran of England's militant suffragette movement: wise-cracking, verbally combative, and still committed to the rights of women. By 1928, however, women's right to vote is wending its way through Parliament and now middle-aged, Miss Simpkin's retellings of the armed battles with authorities play to bored audiences. A chance encounter with a former militant who in the waning years of the 1920s has taken up with proto-Fascists in the guise of training England's youth to respect order and authority ignites a blaze in Simpkin. In response, she organizes girls and young women into a club called The Amazons, teaching them athletics, hiking, fire-making, throwing, debating, map-reading, and well generally all of the things that girls were forbidden to partake of during the long reign of Queen Victoria. You can see the competition between the two groups in the offing with the underlying (and still wholly relevant) question of how gir...

Sometimes, examination of a microscopic detail can illustrate a much larger image. Such is the case in this thoroughly researched biography of Erich Hartmann, the WW II pilot with the greatest number of kills. Hartmann dispatched more than 300 enemy airplanes while flying missions for Germany's Luftwaffe, more than double the war's next most successful pilot, and in general terms, ten times as many as an average pilot flying for any country during the war. Hartmann's unchallenged ability to knock an airplane out of the sky depended upon incredible close-flying skill, devastating sneak attacks, point-blank firing, and rapid escape to avoid hurtling shrapnel. Hagiographers on both sides of the Atlantic have elevated Hartmann to idol status in the subsequent decades; a dueling knight of chivalry and honor. Which is why Schmidt's detailed analysis is so timely and important. Hartmann, after all, was flying in support of Hitler's offensives on the Western Front, t...

Today, I have a guest writer: my daughter, Leah. Leah is an excellent sourdough baker and like me, since the beginning of Covid, has been sharing starters and advice. Here are Leah Pallant's instructions for "Keeping Your Sourdough Alive." Photos courtesy, John Mangine . Keeping your starter alive. By Leah Pallant Getting Started I encourage you to think about this process like watering a plant - many sources will tell you that you MUST feed your sourdough every X days to avoid tragedy. I have personally gone against just about every recommendation out there, and kept my starters kicking.  So, basically: you are now the proud parent of a lovely sourdough culture. As a colony of primarily lactobacili bacteria and several species of yeast,  your culture needs water, a healthy dose of aeration, and flour every now and again to live a happy and productive life. You can slow down its consumption needs by giving it fridge time (this is where mine spend 98% of ...

One of America's great bakers with an awesome collection of formulas and recipes is Maurizio, author of the blog The Perfect Loaf . Maurizio's recipes are superbly researched, well conceived, and intricate. Maurizio's recipes are not for beginners and I haven't always had success the first time through, but when I do, as I did this week with Maurizio's Sourdough Babka , the rewards are fantastic. The reason this babka was so delicious, I'm certain, is because I only made the starter. My wife, who cooks like a chemist, and follows measurements to the microgram, did all the assembly, and moreover, had the patience to wait on the second day rise for nearly 8 hours rather than the proposed 2.5 hours. The result was a creamy interior that was not sour, but neither was it yeasty. It was definitely not overly sweet as so many babkas can be, and the cinnamon, which often gets lost upon baking, was likewise present without being overpowering. To sta...

I made some changes to my pizza that really paid off. First, I had my wife Susan do the ingredient layout. Second, I kneaded the heck out of my dough. I built the strongest gluten network I could. And third, I pushed my oven to 550 degrees.

A boy immigrates from Vietnam with his war-scarred mother and schizophrenic grandmother. Together in Hartford, Connecticut, Mom works exhausting hours in a nail salon while her son becomes fully American. Mom never learns to read English, so this book acts as a letter from son to mother. It is a letter she will never be able to read. Growing up in Hartford's slums and working summers as a tobacco picker, Little Dog, as he is called, absorbs drugs and his burgeoning homosexuality. Little Dog's recounting of the stress of learning a new language, of renting on the wrong side of town, of being picked on for having yellow skin and a pink bicycle ring so true it is hard to imagine any part of this being fictional.  If you are a fan of poetry, Ocean Vuong, is a soaring, visionary, prize-winning poet whose language elevates a simple story of immigration and coming-of-age into a Homeric epic. If, like me, poetry is not exactly your thing, a 285-page saga, like Icarus flying...