This Morning, I'm Baking
Mar. 5th, 2014 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluThis entry actually should have hit the airwaves on Saturday, March 1, which is when most of it was typed, but there was a small contretemps somewhere on the intertubes, and I was distracted. Here, have a picture of bread.
I hadn't intended to bake bread this morning -- we're not done with the loaf I baked yesterday -- but when I went to get milk out of the refrigerator I discovered that the dough left over from yesterday was perhaps a shade too lively, and had muscled the lid right off its bowl and was making a break for freedom. Clearly, I need a bigger dough storage bowl, but in the mean time, it seemed wise to do something with the blob that had tried to escape. I had just recently been poking around the Artisan Bread in Five site and decided to braid the blob -- mostly just to try it -- and what you see is the result. Not as pretty, or as obviously braided, as their loaf, but it's still a good-lookin' loaf of bread, I think.
This is fall-out of having recently read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. This was something I picked up casually off the sale table at Elliott Bay Books, nosed into a little in the store, and found surprisingly fascinating. The basic gig is that Flinn, a recent graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, was feeling at loose ends because she hadn't opened a restaurant, had no clear drive to do so, but still wanted to do something with all that hard-won Cordon Bleu expertise. Inspired by a chance encounter in the grocery store (in which Flinn, it has to be said, acted like a shocking busybody, and some woman humbly endured it -hopefully to her own benefit, at least), Flinn tumbled to the idea of taking a bunch of volunteer cooking novices under her wing and teaching them the kind of kitchen basics that would enable them to cook more meals at home, from scratch, and empower them to ditch the prepared foods and McDonald's meals if they wanted to. It's absolutely true that part of the fascination with this book is vicarious, both at the peek at where these women started (the one male volunteer never showed up) and at the life changes wrought by the end of the class.
But even for me it's not going too far to say the book was life changing. Life changing in small, incremental ways, for sure, but definitely life changing. I reckon myself a reasonably competent, from-scratch and off-recipe cook. I know how to hold a knife. I can make soup out of whatever's in the fridge, and have been known to make stock from a chicken carcass in my day. But the thing is I'm also mostly self-taught, having picked up bits and bobs piecemeal over many years. My mother was a mostly-off-recipe cook too, and very much believed that was a skill I ought to have, but Mom also considered cooking to be an onerous chore, and she didn't have much patience for teaching. It's no exaggeration to say I spent more time learning from and cooking together with my grandmother, who lived a few thousand miles away in another country, than I ever did with Mom. Mom's primary pedagogical model in all things was tossing people (and house pets) in at the deep end and expecting them to derive the perfect crawl stroke from first (and obvious) principles, by trial and error. She did insist that I take a Home Ec class one summer in Junior High, but since that focused primarily on such things as quick breads (and making your own Bisquick substitute -- woo hoo!), lemon bars, and fudge, it wasn't much use as a cooking basics class. Boil an egg? Knife skills? Sauteeing? You gotta be kidding, right? So the main things I got from Mom were a lingering sense that cooking is tedious, and a deep conviction that it is still something you need to be able to do, without dependence on a cookbook.
Over the course of the intervening years, I've slowly picked up a selection of cooking skills from a motley assemblage of sources: trial and error and experimentation, books, recipes out of magazines and on the web, attempts to replicate something I've enjoyed in a restaurant or at a pot luck, glimpses of random Food Network and cooking shows, and of course my beloved Good Eats. I have gradually shed the inherited resentment toward cooking and learned to take pleasure in it, but there's nothing systematic about my knowledge, and I've never taken a class since that unfortunate Home Ec experience, so it's all a bit gappy and random. More than anything, the book pointed out some of my gaps, and helped me fill them.
So, life changing: what do I mean by that? For starters, I bought a new chef's knife. My first chef's knife, actually. For many years I've been perfectly happy with my not even remotely stainless carbon steel Chinese cleaver. But I had recently read the book's section on knife skills and how to choose a knife, and how it's good to check the feel of the knife and how you like the way it sits in your hand. It's such a simple thing to look for, but somehow it had never occurred to me to check how a knife feels. Not long after, I spotted the Gunter Wilhelm booth selling 440C knives at my Costco. Because I'd read the footnotes in the chapter, I now knew that 440C was the hardest of the 440 high carbon stainless grades and so I walked over and I picked up a chef's knife, just out of curiosity, to try out this getting-the-feel business, and it was love at first grope. I really liked the heft and balance -- the GW knives have a triple tang and with all that steel in the handle the chef's knife has serious weight to it. With the weight balanced firmly in the hand, rather than in the blade, I felt much more in control of the knife. The booth guys let me test drive the knife on some of the vegetables they had set up, and I loved the amazing sharpness of the blade. And the knife was like 40 bucks at Costco, which is an amazing price for a good knife, and a lot less than my twenty-year-old Henkels-or-Wusthoff-can't-remember-which carving knife, which even new never had such a pleasant balance or surgically sharp edge. So I bought it. At home I watched a few YouTube videos on using a steel correctly (I hadn't been) and sharpening knives and the correct way to dice an onion, and lately, prepping vegetables is actually kinda fun. I'm actually enjoying dicing onions. That's a new one on me. I love my knife. I thought nothing would improve on my dear old $5 Chinese cleaver, but the Gunter Wilhelm knife holds its edge longer, and doesn't rust if you look away for 2 minutes...
And the section on food waste offered little epiphanies, too. Again, really simple advice, but it hadn't occurred to me before -- oils go rancid (I knew that) so don't get suckered in by lower cost per ounce on larger bottles. It's not a deal if you end up throwing away half the oil after it goes bad (and I've thrown away whole bottles). Buy the smallest bottle available and don't stockpile -- that way lies pointless waste. I'm also working through my spices and condiments and slowly getting rid of the ones that are long past their useful life. It's all pretty liberating.
And yeah, I'm baking bread, for the second day in a row. Flinn includes a no-knead recipe adapted from Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois' Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day which allows for several loaves from the same batch of dough, with almost no work after you've made the dough the first day. And I can now vouch for the fact that this bread isn't just good-looking, it's pretty damn' tasty, too. So, any books changed your life lately?
I hadn't intended to bake bread this morning -- we're not done with the loaf I baked yesterday -- but when I went to get milk out of the refrigerator I discovered that the dough left over from yesterday was perhaps a shade too lively, and had muscled the lid right off its bowl and was making a break for freedom. Clearly, I need a bigger dough storage bowl, but in the mean time, it seemed wise to do something with the blob that had tried to escape. I had just recently been poking around the Artisan Bread in Five site and decided to braid the blob -- mostly just to try it -- and what you see is the result. Not as pretty, or as obviously braided, as their loaf, but it's still a good-lookin' loaf of bread, I think.
This is fall-out of having recently read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. This was something I picked up casually off the sale table at Elliott Bay Books, nosed into a little in the store, and found surprisingly fascinating. The basic gig is that Flinn, a recent graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, was feeling at loose ends because she hadn't opened a restaurant, had no clear drive to do so, but still wanted to do something with all that hard-won Cordon Bleu expertise. Inspired by a chance encounter in the grocery store (in which Flinn, it has to be said, acted like a shocking busybody, and some woman humbly endured it -hopefully to her own benefit, at least), Flinn tumbled to the idea of taking a bunch of volunteer cooking novices under her wing and teaching them the kind of kitchen basics that would enable them to cook more meals at home, from scratch, and empower them to ditch the prepared foods and McDonald's meals if they wanted to. It's absolutely true that part of the fascination with this book is vicarious, both at the peek at where these women started (the one male volunteer never showed up) and at the life changes wrought by the end of the class.
But even for me it's not going too far to say the book was life changing. Life changing in small, incremental ways, for sure, but definitely life changing. I reckon myself a reasonably competent, from-scratch and off-recipe cook. I know how to hold a knife. I can make soup out of whatever's in the fridge, and have been known to make stock from a chicken carcass in my day. But the thing is I'm also mostly self-taught, having picked up bits and bobs piecemeal over many years. My mother was a mostly-off-recipe cook too, and very much believed that was a skill I ought to have, but Mom also considered cooking to be an onerous chore, and she didn't have much patience for teaching. It's no exaggeration to say I spent more time learning from and cooking together with my grandmother, who lived a few thousand miles away in another country, than I ever did with Mom. Mom's primary pedagogical model in all things was tossing people (and house pets) in at the deep end and expecting them to derive the perfect crawl stroke from first (and obvious) principles, by trial and error. She did insist that I take a Home Ec class one summer in Junior High, but since that focused primarily on such things as quick breads (and making your own Bisquick substitute -- woo hoo!), lemon bars, and fudge, it wasn't much use as a cooking basics class. Boil an egg? Knife skills? Sauteeing? You gotta be kidding, right? So the main things I got from Mom were a lingering sense that cooking is tedious, and a deep conviction that it is still something you need to be able to do, without dependence on a cookbook.
Over the course of the intervening years, I've slowly picked up a selection of cooking skills from a motley assemblage of sources: trial and error and experimentation, books, recipes out of magazines and on the web, attempts to replicate something I've enjoyed in a restaurant or at a pot luck, glimpses of random Food Network and cooking shows, and of course my beloved Good Eats. I have gradually shed the inherited resentment toward cooking and learned to take pleasure in it, but there's nothing systematic about my knowledge, and I've never taken a class since that unfortunate Home Ec experience, so it's all a bit gappy and random. More than anything, the book pointed out some of my gaps, and helped me fill them.
So, life changing: what do I mean by that? For starters, I bought a new chef's knife. My first chef's knife, actually. For many years I've been perfectly happy with my not even remotely stainless carbon steel Chinese cleaver. But I had recently read the book's section on knife skills and how to choose a knife, and how it's good to check the feel of the knife and how you like the way it sits in your hand. It's such a simple thing to look for, but somehow it had never occurred to me to check how a knife feels. Not long after, I spotted the Gunter Wilhelm booth selling 440C knives at my Costco. Because I'd read the footnotes in the chapter, I now knew that 440C was the hardest of the 440 high carbon stainless grades and so I walked over and I picked up a chef's knife, just out of curiosity, to try out this getting-the-feel business, and it was love at first grope. I really liked the heft and balance -- the GW knives have a triple tang and with all that steel in the handle the chef's knife has serious weight to it. With the weight balanced firmly in the hand, rather than in the blade, I felt much more in control of the knife. The booth guys let me test drive the knife on some of the vegetables they had set up, and I loved the amazing sharpness of the blade. And the knife was like 40 bucks at Costco, which is an amazing price for a good knife, and a lot less than my twenty-year-old Henkels-or-Wusthoff-can't-remember-which carving knife, which even new never had such a pleasant balance or surgically sharp edge. So I bought it. At home I watched a few YouTube videos on using a steel correctly (I hadn't been) and sharpening knives and the correct way to dice an onion, and lately, prepping vegetables is actually kinda fun. I'm actually enjoying dicing onions. That's a new one on me. I love my knife. I thought nothing would improve on my dear old $5 Chinese cleaver, but the Gunter Wilhelm knife holds its edge longer, and doesn't rust if you look away for 2 minutes...
And the section on food waste offered little epiphanies, too. Again, really simple advice, but it hadn't occurred to me before -- oils go rancid (I knew that) so don't get suckered in by lower cost per ounce on larger bottles. It's not a deal if you end up throwing away half the oil after it goes bad (and I've thrown away whole bottles). Buy the smallest bottle available and don't stockpile -- that way lies pointless waste. I'm also working through my spices and condiments and slowly getting rid of the ones that are long past their useful life. It's all pretty liberating.
And yeah, I'm baking bread, for the second day in a row. Flinn includes a no-knead recipe adapted from Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois' Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day which allows for several loaves from the same batch of dough, with almost no work after you've made the dough the first day. And I can now vouch for the fact that this bread isn't just good-looking, it's pretty damn' tasty, too. So, any books changed your life lately?
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