Doughy

A couple of weeks ago, I got a copy of The Bread Bakers Apprentice through an inter-library loan.

This is one of the books that serious amateur bread bakers rave about. The author, Peter Reinhart, is one of the baking world's gods -- in fact, as I sit here thinking about it, no other name comes to mind. His is the one that people always refer to. It's almost at the point where he is referred to as 'Peter' -- because, of course, if you're reading a blog about bread and baking, what other Peter could there be? I had wanted to look at it -- I almost said read it, but I don't read cookbooks, certainly not ones that are this long -- because a blog from where I got a decent dough recipe for pizza said that it was a modified version of the one that he has here. Reinhart's written an entire book about his search for the perfect pizza, incidentally, taking the definition of 'pizza' far, far beyond what I consider 'perfect'; he actually went to Italy, tasting different versions as he traveled, and also throughout the United States, eating the famous -- to pizza lovers, anyway -- versions in New York, Chicago, Connecticut, and elsewhere. This level of interest and dedication is way beyond me, and so I tend to just see a recipe, say 'hey, let's try this', and leave it at that. Nevertheless, the recipe that that blog had was so good, in that it consistently created a decent, soft, malleable dough, that I thought I ought to try to read the original. The book's been sitting by the nightstand -- way too big to just pick up for casual reading from the top of the nightstand -- and every so often I'd look at it and think that damn book is going to be due back at the library soon, I ought to read SOMETHING from it.

So this morning, after playing with the cat a bit == I think that Abbicat, so much as she likes anything, really likes our house, even if we did keep her pretty much locked up for the 24 hours when all those girls were here; the whole damn house is one big cat toy, and, with only a few limitations, we pretty much let her go wherever she wants, which usually means a) sleeping on our bed, b) sleeping on the couch, or c) sleeping on the living room carpet == I came out to the kitchen, made some chocolate orange coffee, and started to leaf through the book. Almost immediately, I hit some text that caught my attention, but not in a good way. He was talking with someone about this version of bread baking versus that one, and showing the person two loaves, one baked each way; the person, stunned by the sheer excellence of the Reinhart loaf, threw his own against the wall, where it shattered and fell to the floor. (Which is where the difference comes in between me and him; if it had been one of my loaves, it would have been the wall that shattered. Density is a problem with my bread.) I leafed forward a couple of pages, slowing to read a little bit about 'bakers percentage', which I'd already known about, though I don't use it (it's a way of measuring out ingredients by weight rather than cups or other methods; the advantage is that it's consistent - a given weight of flour will always contain the same amount, where a cup of flour will weigh differently, and contain a different amount of flour, depending on how it was scooped and what the temperature is. And, for all I know, the phase of the moon. That varying difference affects how the bread turns out). And then a little about types of flours. And then a bit about how a couche works. And the effectiveness of parchment paper. And suddenly, I realized. I was enjoying the book. Even the are you KIDDING me? sections.

Though I'm not a very good bread baker (no fake humbleness; I'm really not), I'm becoming a little bit of a bread geek.