Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  No question about it, Maurizio Leo's The Perfect Loaf contains my favorite collection of sourdough bread formulae. As this was Kamut week, I wanted to give his Kamut Demi-Baguettes a go. For long-time readers, this would ordinarily be Uncle Marty week when he would be making goose, and elegant beef, and several varieties of salmon, and I would be making breads for accompaniment, but of course it's Covid-2020, so no family gatherings until 2021. The bread begins with the creation of a very stiff levain containing the sourdough starter, which is then broken up and added to a mixture of several types of flour, about half of which is kamut. The stiff levain is squelched into the dough. The dough is kneaded by a method called French Slap and Fold producing a dough with extraordinary elasticity. The bald spots on top of my head are photoshopped in to enhance the look of the dough. I actually have a full head of hair. The baguettes are formed and rested on a linen couche for a fina...

  Kamut, or Khorasan, wheat is an ancient relative of modern bread wheat. A few years ago, I purchased some grain, but only this week got around to milling it and making two different kinds of bread with it. Milled kamut is golden. It feels less silky and more granular than bread wheat. I was interested in making some Moroccan bread to accompany a lamb tagine we were making and looked for recipes for Khobz. The range of breads called Khobz was astounding. The only thing they seemed to have in common was their roundness. Some were puffed like pita, though most were about an inch or two thick without a pocket. There were recipes with no leavening, recipes with yeast, and a few with sourdough. They could be a few inches in diameter or much larger, have sesame seeds on top, or were brushed with olive oil. I settled on a variant of this recipe, Sourdough Khobz Arabi , substituting kamut for some of the bread flour (I'll have to measure next time) and experimented with fork-piercings, se...

Rye flour does not have much gluten so it does not rise very much. Traditional rye breads tend to be heavy. Moreover, if allowed to rise for too long a period of time enzymes present in rye flour will break apart what little structure the rye flour has, and the final bread can be exceedingly dense. Sourdough, because of its natural acidity, inhibits the enzyme and is therefore a natural partner for rye breads. Frisian Black Bread, courtesy Stanley Ginsberg's excellent The Rye Baker, takes nearly two days to assemble and even after all the ingredients have been well mixed, it still pours like a batter into a loaf pan. Like many rye breads, too, the loaf requires another 24 hours after it comes out of the oven to release moisture or its innards will be gummy. I was surprised that I got as much oven spring as I did and even more pleasantly amazed at how tasty the bread was with some cream cheese, gravlax, and rings of thinly sliced red onion.

A true story of the FBI breaking a seemingly impossible code and using their findings to uncover the Soviet agents who stole America's atomic secrets. You would think that having access to minute-by-minute code analysis, dogged footwork by FBI agents, and the internal conflicts of characters on both sides of the chase (How can Blum even know such things?) would make for heart-thumping reading. Not only does the hunt fail to come to life, however, but the parts missing from the book speak far louder than what was included. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, like much of America in the 1940s and 1950s was a racist, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist, unforgiving bastion of toxic masculinity (Hoover's predilection for wearing women's clothing and dating other men, notwithstanding.) Nearly every so-called turncoat uncovered in this book was a young Jewish ideologue from New York City who worked, not in exchange for remuneration, but for some higher calling. Was it because the Americans had ...

Looking to escape a recent divorce and 25 years as a Chicago cop - the divorce and his job are related - Cal Hooper buys himself a fixer-upper on the edge of a small Irish village. Literally and metaphorically, Cal strips wallpaper, clears cobwebs, chips at peeling paint, and rambles the Irish countryside. His neighbor, Mart, a bachelor farmer getting on in years, but gifted with an Irish sense of gab, regularly comes down to lean on Cal's fence to shoot the shite.  Cal's life goes awry when 12-year-old Trey shows up outside his living room window. At night. Trey comes from a fatherless family up in the mountains. Mom is poor and broken. Siblings are young and filthy or older and missing, some by choice, and as Trey finally makes clear, one brother appears to be gone without a trace. French's strength as a writer is to capture landscape, personality and dialogue with such precision that her readers are grabbed by the arm, hauled into an Irish pub, and made part of the commo...

  This book had everything I hoped for, except a compelling narrative. Thoroughly researched, John T. Edge makes a strong case for tracking the development of recent southern history through its food. Beginning in the deeply racist Jim Crow era of the middle 20th century, Edge paints a picture of the intermixing of Black and white cuisines: corn bread, boiled beans and greens, various parts of hog. Just as quickly he makes it clear that Black food was discarded white food that was a necessity for survival and white food was cultivated, prepared, and silently and obediently served by Black staff. The fight for civil rights was fought at southern lunch counters as much as it was in the voting booths and on buses. Even into the 1960s tens of thousands of Blacks suffered from starvation across the south. Black children whose parents were so disbarred from the American economy lay upon dirt floors, their bellies distended, flies in their eyes, too lethargic to care. Whites claimed, and ...

As he did in Dark Star Safari , Paul Theroux's north to south bus trip through Africa, On the Plain of Snakes  recounts Theroux's north-to-south overland journey through Mexico. Now in his 80s and feeling disregarded by an American society that forsakes the elderly, Theroux headed to Mexico to write a travelogue in a country that reveres its older citizens. He drove his own car beginning from home in Massachusetts. Racing to cross the border Dodging Narco-warlords who control life along the US-Mexican border and coyotes who smuggle Mexicans into the United States, Theroux started his journey by skipping back and forth across the contended border from west to east before making a full plunge southward. On the US side he spoke with Mexican agricultural workers, most of them undocumented in the US laboring to tend and harvest our food supply. On the Mexican side of the fence, he met Mexicans working for a few dollars a day to manufacture the appliances and cars that NAFTA makes av...

During the Dark Ages, bread was a dietary mainstay. Consuming more calories than it took to stay alive was an everyday endeavor and not always successful. The average lifespan for a male that survived childhood diseases was mid-30s and a female that lived until 30 was a major accomplishment. Bread was made from wheat if you had it and were exceptionally wealthy, but for most everyone else, bread was made of the flour of whatever crops could be harvested: a little wheat, complemented by barley, rye, and in desperate years lentils and acorns. I made this Maslin Bread, maslin means mixed, of barley, rye, and wheat flour all of which I milled myself following a recipe from the Oakden Research Center  in the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, the bread was somewhere between "dense" and "healthy." It was shockingly tasty, however. There is something about the combination of the three grains that is indeed complimentary and I have enjoyed the bread with every meal of the da...