Saturday, May 29, 2010

Reading

I'm really liking the La Brea Bakery book. I'm not even in the same time zone, skill wise, as this woman, but I admire her attitude toward bread and toward baking.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have to be careful what I say because many times I've said it before, often to the same people. I went to Italy one time, was taken with their breads. In this particular town in the south of Italy you didn't buy your bread at a grocery store, you got it from the bakery. The owner of the joint told me he baked in a 400 year old oven and I watched him moving bread in and out. I thought several of his breads the best tasting ever.

When I got back home I was thinking it didn't matter if the oven was four or four hundred, anyone could bake bread. So started my great bread baking adventure. I baked all kinds of breads. Used flours I'd never before heard of. Tried several yeasts. Made some delicious breads, admittedly not as good as the Italian bread but good. Gained thirty pounds. Quit cooking. Went on a diet.

Cerulean Bill said...

One of the advantages of not having a child until I was 45 is that I can tell her stories now that she hasn't heard three times already. Twice, sometimes. Though then she tells me that I'm remembering them wrong. Sometimes, she's right.

Bread is a funny thing. I think people get REALLY intense about it. I think that while it matters at the ninth degree, down here in the lowlands where I bake, the difference between my oven and that fellow's oven is inconsequential. I occasionally read a blog called Slice, about pizza. People there are as intense -- its got to be charred on the bottom (but not too much!!!), its got to have home made sauce (but tomato isn't always a good idea!!!) My feeling, when I make pizza, is, if it tastes good, thats fine. Could it have been better? Yeah, and there are times I wonder how to do that. But most of the time, I think Hey, this is good enough. I'm not a Cooks Illustrated recipe dicer kind of guy.