In Memory of Bread

by Paul Graham

  It took me weeks to work my way up to the Test Kitchen’s pizza dough recipe. I had read the recipe before and it scared me off. Here was not a process that one just wandered into at four o’clock of a Saturday afternoon, when friends were coming over and you wanted a pizza to go with some beers and the ballgame on the TV. Oh, I think we’ll have us a pizza. The price of admission was high: five hours start to finish, from the mixing, proofing, and shaping to the par-baking, finishing, and cooling. You have to want a pizza badly, though as a bonus you get to freeze one par-baked crust for later use (if you don’t share it with your friends, who won’t want it anyway, having been scarred, as I was, by gluten-free pizzas in the past; we’ve never made pizza for any of our guests, ever, and we probably never will). Once again, an apparition of Christopher Kimball seemed to be hovering in the corner of my kitchen, scrutinizing me, asking me just how badly I wanted a legit adaptation of a food I loved.

  Pretty badly, I guess.

  One of the magic ingredients in this pizza recipe, elevating it from Neolithic flatbread topped with cheese, is almond flour in high volume, which provides the depth and body and a good deal of expense, at eight dollars for a twelve-ounce bag (you don’t use the whole bag, at least). And you haven’t even topped this pie, yet. Like so many other conventional foods that go GF, this pizza severs ties with peasant traditions, with working-class Italian-American neighborhoods, in order to taste like something that my Italian grandfather, who enjoyed his pizza and knew a good one when he ate it—and a bad one, too—might truly enjoy.

  After beating the hell out of the dough for the required six minutes with the stand mixer, I immediately noticed something different. This mixture was a little messy, a little wet and heavy, yes, but it seemed to have some elasticity. I covered it with a damp, warm towel. I walked away for an hour.

  And when I came back, it had risen substantially. I poked it, and the dough sprang back. It almost looked alive.

  I worked the ball into a circle as directed. The feeling of the dough giving beneath my hands was so wonderfully familiar, and yet so long gone, that I kept on with it. After all, it wasn’t like there was gluten for me to overwork. The recipe called for me to keep a sheet of greased plastic wrap between my fingers and the dough. I started out this way, but soon I couldn’t help myself: I said the hell with the plastic wrap and used the tips of my bare fingers to press and stretch. I did so gently at first, afraid that I would kill it.

  I didn’t kill it. This was happening. I was kneading dough. With a smile on my face. Now I might have been experiencing M. F. K. Fisher’s yoga analogy, except that I was far from tranquil. I was elated, because the ATK had restored one of the biggest casualties of gluten-free bread-making and pizza-making: you never touch that stuff. You don’t want to; it’s wet, and slimy, and completely unpleasant. And as a result, you don’t develop a relationship with the dough, don’t feel that sensation that so many bakers and cooks have known and loved for so long, the methodical pressing and turning and folding, the knowledge that something is taking shape beneath your hands.

  I did not turn and fold this dough. But I did press my luck (literally). When I had finished shaping the second crust, I went back and perfected the first. Then I returned to the second and pinched the edges. I shoved them into the oven to par-bake.

  Who the hell figured this out? A laxative puts pizza back in pizza. Such a far cry. It sounded like a joke. The things we human beings will do. Will try. Will eat, even when the chances of gratification seem minimal at best, and, while chewing the bland grit of disappointment, proceed to plot the next innovation, the next attempt, until, finally, we triumph. All that for a pizza. Our love of food indeed has us by the short hairs.

  The rest of the pizza story? Nearly anticlimactic. It baked up just like it was supposed to; the crust browned; it looked beautiful. I topped it with cheese made with milk from our friend Susan’s goat, Luna; green shallots; kalamata olives; and broccoli florets. Then I added a sprinkling of fresh thyme. Our kitchen smelled like pizza for the first time in two years, and as the pie baked, I remembered how regularly we used to eat pizza, our own pizza, and only rarely from the local place that catered to the college students. We topped our pies with things like dried Black Mission figs and red onions, prosciutto and scallions. But, back then, every time I ate a few slices—always washing it down with a Saranac Pale Ale or an IPA—I felt slightly off all night and into the next day.

  Bec and I sat down and poured a can of Glutenberg each. Since it was the first time trying the pizza, we ate a little more cautiously than we might normally, knowing, as we did, that this pie had been brought to us in part by Metamucil. But the pizza tasted like pizza. It tasted like Friday night, like days as a child when I rode home in the car with the hot box level on my legs, like late-night feeds at college—and not like flatbread or a cardboard box or anything other than what it was supposed to taste like. As far as I could tell, anyway. It had, after all, been a long time. We kept saying to each other, with amazement, “We’re eating pizza. Pizza! I’d honestly left it for dead.”

  * * *

  *1 Among them, Nancy Cain’s Against the Grain GF cookbook, which adapts some recipes from Against the Grain Gourmet, a GF bakery in Brattleboro, Vermont, and provides plenty more that the bakery does not feature. This book was released a year later than and provides a nice contrast to HCIBGF, in that it eschews many of the ingredients and processes the ATK uses, and with good results.

  *2 And here we had another problem. I couldn’t eat oat flour, not even GF oat flour, because I had discovered, or rather confirmed, that my shoot-first/ask-questions-later immune system mistook the avenin protein in oats as a foreign invader too, responding to it as if it were gluten. Oat flour is important in GF baking because of its protein content and the way it absorbs moisture. It appeared that now I was baking with not one but two hands tied behind my back.

  *3 Where it is known as Isabgol, which sounds like it could be the Epic Glutenator’s nemesis.

  It was a testament to how far I’d come in one year as a celiac and a traveler that I should find myself, that June, in a Pasadena civic center ballroom looking for the nearest exit as the Celiac Disease Foundation Conference kicked off with an invocation of sorts: a song, “Don’t Cry for Me, Gluten-Eaters,” sung to the tune of—you guessed it—“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

  I glanced at Bec. I’ve never felt comfortable when people burst into song in front of me. I spent the entire three minutes of musical shout-outs to the GF corporate sponsors of the conference and star physicians—many of whom had dedicated their life’s work to celiac-disease research, and, in so doing, had prepared a softer place for me to crash-land when my time came to go down in flames—with my face in my hands. Gluten-eaters should cry for us, I thought. Every last one of them. They should try to cook with birdseed; they should make French toast with the Styrofoam GF loaves available in stores; they should throw a Fourth of July party featuring GF pretzels and Toleration beer and watch their guests’ faces. I knew the song was all in good fun. I had come to do serious work, and once the conference started, I wasn’t disappointed. Prominent physicians spoke on the past, present, and future of the disease; pharmaceutical reps talked about pathways to treatment and cures; and researchers presented the stark data on the results of “noncompliance.”

  Following the conference, we circled the GF product expo. In less than an hour, Bec and I had both filled mesh bags with free samples of crackers, cookies, cereals, energy bars, and other products. The battle for market share seemed to be palpable in the room. Later, back at the hotel, I was unable to resist carrying out an obnoxious experiment: I added up the caloric value of our GF take, and was shocked to find that we had amassed more than ten thousand calories each in prepared GF snack samples. I encountered few examples of whole food in the entire room—a researcher from California was selling mesquite bean flour, which tastes a little like smoky cacao and long ago was a staple of southwestern Native Ameri
cans. And nearby, a prominent physician performed a cooking demo of GF eggplant Parmesan. It was good to see some actual cooking going on amid all the snacks. Curiously, not one privately owned, independent GF bakery was represented at the expo (there were, however, three beers: Bard’s, Green’s, and New Planet).

  The next day, we visited a bakery that had run a table at the expo in previous years. It had become a feature of our travel, no matter how short the distance, to seek out new GF bakeries wherever we went. Yes, we were finally making good bread at home, but we had become like the Europeans from the Middle Ages forward, who were always in search of a better loaf: one that was less gritty, crustier, tastier. In this way, we came to know about Pete’s Gluten Free in Ottawa; Against the Grain Gourmet, out of Brattleboro, Vermont; and, in Pasadena, Whisk Gluten-Free Bakery, run by Lynn McKay and her sister, Stephanie Angle.

  When we met them, Lynn and Stephanie had just moved into a commercial kitchen in an industrial park. They had been riding a long winning streak fueled by increasing demand for gourmet GF products in the greater Los Angeles area, and also by the fact that they were extremely good at GF baking. In keeping with the GF trend, the increase in celiac diagnoses, or both, they could barely meet the orders for breads, cakes, and cupcakes.

  For all their recent triumph, Whisk had experienced the humble start typical of GF bakeries. Following a sense that GF baked goods did not have to be as sad and disappointing as they so often were, Lynn and Stephanie baked out of their homes at first and ran samples around town in their cars. Like me, both were in their thirties, and neither had experienced the truly dark days of GF eating several decades ago. Those baked goods they had tasted did not impress them, though. Now they were part of a GF-cookery renaissance that seemed to be taking place all over the country.

  Their baked goods were extremely successful GF versions of the real thing—to this day, some of the best I’ve tasted. One particular factor seemed to explain Whisk’s overall success, including their ability to appeal to eaters without allergies in addition to those who were intolerant to gluten: while Lynn has celiac disease, Stephanie does not. In the kitchen, this pairing is an enormous advantage. It reminded me that Jack Bishop had said some of the ATK cooks on the HCIBGF project also did not have allergies. Having someone who could move safely between GF and conventional bread and cakes allowed for a better evaluation of an adaptation’s success. I knew that one of the most disturbing aspects of my own experience with celiac disease was my decreasing ability to remember what gluten-based foods really taste like. I was dismayed (yet also a little relieved) the first time I realized that I no longer knew the eating experience I was trying to replicate. Stephanie’s ability to refresh her memory explained her uncanny instincts for creating a flour blend, which featured only three starches: brown rice, potato, and tapioca flour (many commercially blended GF flours use twice that many). Could my flying blind explain why I had so many early failures? If I’d been willing to humble myself to share my GF attempts with wheat eaters, would I have improved faster? It was too late to ask, though it seemed that my pride—or my low tolerance for bad news—had indeed held me back.

  Lynn and Stephanie’s original forte was baked goods, in particular cakes for “allergy parties” for kids and celiacs who had become convinced they would never again taste a real celebratory cake—for birthday, wedding, baby shower, going-away, or any other event. But it seems that no matter how many people with allergies a GF bakery reconnects with birthdays, no matter how many weddings they save from disappointment with beautiful GF confections, in time their customers always begin asking for bread. Sugar is good and treats are nice, but if a person cannot live on bread alone, neither is it possible to survive on butter, sugar, chocolate, and vanilla.

  “You grow up with bread,” Lynn told me when she described how they just seemed to find themselves baking more and more loaves, and adding different varieties. “If you were lucky, you grew up with your mom baking bread. That smell—it’s so strongly nostalgic.”

  We loaded up on Lynn and Stephanie’s bread—as much as we could, given that we had to fly it home. White, Italian herb, cinnamon-raisin. It was better than the bread that we were making with the ATK book, and I struggled to understand why. The industrial mixer? The simpler recipe, with fewer ingredients? The oven? Or was it simply the fact that someone else had made it?

  —

  As anyone in the GF industry might have predicted, the rise and success of Omission Beer—which was the best-selling craft beer in America in any category, GF or not, in 2014—made the production of GR beers tempting for other breweries. My contact at Omission had told me that California-based Stone Brewing had been working on one, and in January 2015 they launched their Delicious IPA, a gluten-reduced beer that uses almost the same process as Omission, with the difference (some would say a problematic difference) that their GR brew is not made in a dedicated facility. While the brewing process is ostensibly safe, Stone’s GR beer is nonetheless right next door to some high-octane gluten. The GR IPA is only brewed seasonally, after the equipment is scrupulously cleaned. It is tested by a third party, White Labs, and, as with Omission, the test results are available for consumers to access online. On their website, Stone Brewing notes that the gluten-stripping process is so thorough that the actual level of gluten in their IPA is too low to be picked up by the current testing technology. Even though they leave no doubt that they take cross-contamination seriously, a lot of celiacs might say there is no good reason to pop a cap on a Stone Delicious.

  Well, almost.

  I wanted to try this beer from Stone. True, I was doing pretty well in the beer department of late, but I expected this new brew would be like so many of the IPAs I had loved and left behind. Like the Omission, Glutenberg, New Grist, Celia Saison, and Plasma, I couldn’t find the Stone GR anywhere in my area. (It did eventually show up in town, as part of a twelve-pack sampler, prompting me to mull entering into the economically unsound strategy of buying the box of beer for eighteen dollars, keeping three I could drink, and giving the other nine to my friend Jon. While he eagerly endorsed this, I never bought the Stones, not even when the fridge was empty of Omission and Glutenberg.)

  I texted David, who now lived in Petaluma. I asked him to keep a lookout since he now lived within striking distance of the Stone mother ship. He found a six-pack, drank half of it as a shipping and handling fee, and sent the remaining three bottles to me. Later on, I realized I had not even paused to consider the absurdity of shipping three beers across the country. What the hell was happening to my mind? And yet, I knew I was in good company. History is full of people going to incredible lengths to secure foodstuffs from basic to fancy. Charlemagne, for example, had as much Roquefort as a monk could fit onto a horse cart brought from the wilds of France back to his imperial capital of Aachen, which, if you think about the condition of roads (and carts) in the year 800 is even crazier than priority-mailing beer. Ernest Shackleton famously brought Bass Ale on his expedition to the South Pole. He and his team would have had to pound the beers early in the journey, before they could freeze, leaving him to pine the rest of the way.

  Still, as my own gestures went, this one stood out. I did not regularly have food shipped to me. Once—I still pretend not to know why—I ordered fresh duck breasts from Pekin Paradise, a farm in Pennsylvania. They were wonderful seared rare and served with an Earl Grey tea-infused sauce at a dinner party, but I felt my grandmother scowling at my decadence from the Other Side, and never ordered duck again, even though Pekin Paradise sent me a Christmas card every year. For a while Jim Harrison’s essays had me wondering about flying in some grouper or snapper when Larry the Fish Guy* retired, though I opted not to in the end. Like many people, we had ordered cheese online to fill the gaps in our area’s offerings in our pre-locavore days, and we still order wine. I perceived, when the three IPAs arrived from California, a tempting if expensive solution to the dearth of options. I promised myself that I was involving the postal ser
vice only in the spirit of exploration and that I wouldn’t develop an internet-order bread or beer habit. I tore through the tape and held the bottles up to the light, a little giddy.

  Then the bottles of IPA sat in the refrigerator. For weeks.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to sample these malty, hophead IPAs. I did, and pretty desperately. But I kept looking at the label and packaging, which David had included, and which stressed even more strongly than the Omission packaging that the beer contained gluten. The repeated references to “barley” and “gluten” spoke louder than the assurances on the website. I attributed the caution to the fact that the facility was not dedicated. And it freaked me out. I was receiving a lesson in the powers of aversion, the way all animals, including humans, know certain foods and liquids are poisonous because they are repellent. However, usually it was the smells of volatile compounds that indicated poison, not an idea.

  On the other hand, what if this beer was actually safe? No different from Omission? Then I was missing a chance to enjoy it.

  I finally took a deep breath and poured one into a pint glass one night. I looked at the beautiful copper color, breathed in the citrusy hops. When I took the first sip, I closed my eyes and felt, as I had felt the first time I tasted a beer made with the God Enzyme, as if I were back in a different time of my life, when the beer tasted this good all the time and I had more options than I could drink in a month. I stretched the Stone-tasting over an hour, sipping and listening for the telltale whirring of my blood in my ears, the rumbling and popping in my gut that told me I was screwed. The symptoms of poisoning never came; I suffered nary a scratch.