Instead of using a towel to form the boule, I pulled out my linen couche, a heavy cloth used for proofing long loaves, floured it thoroughly, and put the gloppy mess on it in a shape as close to a ball as I could muster. Two hours later, the dough had risen and was ready to go into the preheated Dutch oven. Now, how to flop this wet mass of batter into a 450-degree pot without scorching myself? Bittman’s suggestion was to “slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot.” Which I did. Nothing happened. The dough hung upside down, clinging to the cloth like a sleeping bat. I pulled at it with my fingers, and it started to descend slowly, resembling some kind of otherworldly protoplasm.
Finally the slowly sagging goop reached the hot metal, where it sizzled and hissed and gave off a puff of steam, but the other end of it was still attached to my couche, stretching out like Silly Putty. What a mess! Using my metal bench scraper (a handy five-by-seven-inch metal blade in a wooden handle, used for dividing dough and scraping up flour), I skimmed off as much as I could from the couche, giving up the pretense that I was dealing with anything resembling a loaf, and got the damned thing in the oven before it finished frying.
I turned my attention to cleaning up. My new couche was virtually ruined, permeated with the batter, the kitchen littered everywhere with little globs of dough: clinging to the coffeemaker, dripping off the countertop, stuck to my jeans. An hour later, I flipped out the bread. To my surprise, it fell out cleanly. The crust—and there was a lot of it, because the dough had spread out to cover the bottom of the pot—was golden and shiny and covered with appealing blisters. It looked appetizing but more resembled pastry crust than bread crust.
The “boule” was all of two inches high. Rustic boule? Hardly. The crust was crispy and thin as promised, but without the sweetness and depth of my peasant bread crusts. The bread itself lacked flavor, which was surprising, given its eighteen-hour fermentation at room temperature. Yet it wasn’t a total loss: when I sliced into this flat, oval loaf, my suspicions were confirmed: I had made a pretty good ciabatta, that flat Italian white bread with a delicate, crispy crust and an airy interior ideal for dipping into olive oil.
“Are you going to be working with this method again, Dad?” Zach asked, enjoying a slice. “Trying to make your perfect loaf?”
I thought about that for a moment. Making this bread had been about as much fun as doing the dishes. Bittman and Lahey truly seemed to think this method would spark a revolution, creating a nation of new home bread bakers, enabled by this easy, no-knead, no-steam method of baking bread. As with van Over’s hope for a food-processor-bread revolution, I suspect they will be disappointed, for all have missed something essential: when it comes to bread, the end does not necessarily justify the means. Still, I was glad I had done the experiment. It reminded me that there’s more to bread than bread. This isn’t simply about lunch. The process needs to be rewarding.
“No, Zach, I have to give the Dutch oven back to Uncle John,” I said, pulling a hunk of dough out of my hair. Then I went upstairs to take a shower, and as the water ran down my back, I thought about my answer. Why was I so quick to dismiss a promising if imperfect and unsatisfying method after only a single try? What was I in fact after? If I thought we made bread because it took us to another place, what was that place for me?
Why bread? Why me? Why now?
I needed a good shrink.
WEEK
30
Bread Shrink
The reptilian always wins.
—Clotaire Rapaille
I’ll say this: Clotaire Rapaille certainly knows how to make an entrance. After keeping me waiting for five minutes in his spacious study, long enough for the opulence of it to fully set in but not long enough to be rude, Dr. Rapaille, in a très French sports jacket, his wavy salt-and-pepper hair swept back with a certain je ne sais quoi, descended the sweeping marble staircase of his Tuxedo Park, New York, mansion, built in 1890 by the very architect (Rapaille was quick to point out) who designed Grand Central Station. I nearly had a case of the vapors.
I’d been nervous about this interview all morning, changing clothes twice, and then, when told by Dr. Rapaille’s assistant to make myself comfortable anywhere (as if that were possible!), spending several minutes choosing the right seat.
Faced with over half a dozen options, this was no trifling matter. I didn’t want my back to the entrance, which ruled out several seats. There was a chair facing his desk, but that seemed too formal an arrangement, forcing Rapaille to sit behind his desk, and besides, I didn’t want to feel like a delinquent third grader waiting for the teacher to arrive. Other chairs in a grouping around the large fireplace were blocked in by the furniture arrangement, which would make getting up to shake hands awkward.
Hoping to dodge the issue entirely, I remained standing while I examined the paintings on the wall and the books on the table, so carefully arranged, his own book prominently displayed among the French-language classics that were stacked perfectly askew, each book rotated at a twenty-degree angle from the one below it, like the treads of a spiral staircase.
Finally I settled into a richly padded leather chair with a fur thrown over it. That is, a mink fur, thrown carelessly over the chair the way I throw my underwear onto the bed. I hoped I’d chosen the right chair. With a man who is a marketing psychologist (and from the looks of his digs, a fabulously successful one at that), who has made a career of picking up on people’s subconscious actions and hidden codes, you can’t be too careful.
Dr. Rapaille is known for taking a novel approach to market research, not listening to what focus groups say, but getting to what he calls the “structure” behind their words, the emotional connections to the object. A former clinical psychologist, Rapaille does this partly by wearing down his groups in lengthy, three-hour sessions, for the last hour putting his subjects on the floor with pillows, under dimmed lights, while subtly conducting a kind of group analysis session. The third hour is when the truth comes out. For example, Rapaille writes, when you ask people what they want in a car, they’ll rattle off practical things like fuel efficiency, comfort, and safety. But that’s the brain’s cortex speaking, and the cortex doesn’t buy the car. The brain stem does. Ask people about their fondest memory of a car when their guard is down, and you’ll more likely hear about sex in the back-seat or the freedom of the road or that family trip to Grandma’s. Tap into these primitive, subconscious feelings—the reptilian brain, Rapaille calls it—and you’ll sell the car. Which is why Chrysler’s “gangsta” PT Cruiser (Rapaille advised on it) was so successful that there was a long waiting list, despite its having been dismissed by reviewers as, technologically speaking, a piece of junk. Same with another Rapaille project, the resurrected Jeep Wrangler, whose round headlights subtly suggest a horse, an image Jeep played up in their Wild West advertising for a car more likely to be driven on the Jersey Turnpike than in a Texas cattle roundup.
——————————————
“What is it about bread?” I asked Rapaille after he’d finished the theatrical descent down a staircase that made the one at Tara look like a fire escape. “Why do people have such strong emotional attachment to it? Why do the French line up every day to buy their baguettes? Why do we buy so much of the stuff, even when it’s not very good?” I knew he had done market research into bread and had consulted for at least one commercial bakery. If anyone would know, Rapaille was the man.
“You have this smell,” he began, in his seductive Yves Montand accent, “this very special smell that triggers a lot of references, like home and safety, and mother, and ‘I’m going to be fed.’ It’s a very safe place.”
That was precisely the kind of answer I might’ve expected from a psychologist—“mother” in the first sentence! Although his beginning with smell, not taste, was interesting and hinted at the very reason grocery chains often have in-store bakeries. The next sentence, though, surprised me. “If you have water and bread, then that’s enough.”
&
nbsp; “Enough?”
“You know The Count of Monte Cristo? It is a novel. The compte was put in this fortress, a jail, for, like, fifteen years and given nothing but bread and water. For fifteen years. But he developed so much muscle that he was able to dig a tunnel to escape. Which means if you have the right water, and the right bread—the old-time bread—you have total survival. There is something very archetypal and basic in bread. It is the number one thing you need for survival. I was born during the war, you know, in France, and sometimes we had nothing else besides bread. And we were happy. The bread was good.
“There is a very special definition of bread in France,” he continued. “You should have a crust, and it should be hard. And the center should be” — he groped for the word in English — “molle.”
“Soft ?” I guessed.
“Oui, soft. So you need this opposition there. This is very important. When you have this opposition, this is a great bread. We don’t say that about other foods, vegetables, whatever. Only about bread, which is a category of its own. Bread and water. If you have good bread and water, you can survive.”
And the reptilian brain, at some level, knows that.
We talked a bit about the rituals surrounding bread, and Rapaille noted that in France, bread at the table is not sliced but broken, a powerful, communal act that begins a meal. (In America, of course, most of us would recoil if a dining partner handled food in such an intimate and unsanitary manner. We prefer our bread neatly sliced, ready to be plucked out of the basket with antiseptic hands.)
“When French people come to America, they say there is no bread,” Rapaille mused. “There is no distinction between the crust and the center. It is all just like plastic. The symbolism is that you should . . . keech”—he made a crackling sound to accompany his hand motion—“break the bread. When you cannot do that, this American bread is not really bread.”
A knock at the door interrupted us. A young man—a servant, not an aide, not a secretary, but a real, live, honest-to-God servant—dressed in a tie and dark suit,* entered with a silver tray, on which sat a silver pot of coffee. I briefly wondered what country—and what century—I was in.
I took advantage of the distraction to reflect on what I really expected to learn from Rapaille, why I was even here. But I couldn’t quite get it out.
“What type of bread are you making?” he asked after the servant had silently closed the door behind him. I explained my single-minded, year-long quest for the perfect pain de campagne. “Just one type?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
Here we go again. Why did everyone (especially shrinks) have such a problem with this? If I were baking a different kind of bread each week, no one would blink an eyelash, but somehow this pursuit of trying to do one thing very well made me eccentric.
Rapaille talked more about rituals, the difference between sharing a baguette and sharing a boule (with a baguette, someone always gets the end piece—the croûton—but with a round loaf, as with the Knights of the Round Table, all the slices are egalitarian). He displayed a surprising degree of bread knowledge when he discussed how the shape of the loaf also affects the ratio of crust to crumb, and therefore the flavor as well, and he kept returning to the smell.
And I kept returning to, “What is it about bread?” I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I didn’t feel I was finding it. If the aroma was such an important factor, that made my obsession with bread all the more mysterious. I’m pretty sure that as a child, I never experienced the smell of fresh-baked bread in my house, not even once. Yet that could be important in itself. Was I subconsciously trying, not to re-create something primal from my childhood, but to create something that had been missing?
Finally, after more than three-quarters of an hour, a little worn down, slumped in my chair, the lights in my brain dimming a bit, my cortex relaxed and my brain stem blurted out the true, reptilian reason for my visit.
“Dr. Rapaille, why am I obsessed with bread?”
The doctor glanced at his watch. The fifty-minute hour was over. Our time was up.
WEEK
31
State Fair
This is Fair Week and everybody is going to enjoy it if I have to follow them with a shotgun.
—Phil Strong, State Fair, 1932
Looking up at the dead-of-night sky, I was relieved to see stars. I was half-asleep, but at least I’d have good weather for my pre-dawn, four-hour drive to Syracuse.
Thirty minutes later, still a good hour from daybreak—if day could break through at all—I found myself closed in by a fog so dense I could barely see the shoulder of the road. The speed limit was sixty-five; the sensible limit in these conditions, thirty. Yet I didn’t know how long this fog would last, and if I drove all the way to Syracuse at thirty miles an hour, I’d miss the competition. I eased the cruise control back to sixty and hoped for the best, praying that this was a local phenomenon that would soon clear.
Two hours later, still in darkness, the fog had become so thick it was condensing on the windshield, requiring me to give the wipers a kick now and then, which mainly had the effect of smearing the accumulation of splattered bugs on the glass, further reducing my visibility and making the car feel small and isolated, with no signposts to follow and no reliable gauge of direction or progress.
In other words, the perfect metaphor for my journey to bread perfection. Just past the halfway point of my fifty-two-week odyssey, I needed a sign, a validation of the six months I’d devoted to this single-minded passion. Yes, it was high time for an independent evaluation of my bread, by people who weren’t family or friends, who didn’t know of me or my quest, and who would be totally objective and bluntly honest, no matter how much it hurt. We call such people judges, and within a few hours, a half dozen of them would be comparing my peasant loaf to the other entries in Category 02, the Yeast Breads class at the oldest state fair in the nation, the New York State Fair.
Although it wasn’t warm in the car, I kept the windows closed and the air conditioner running the entire trip so that the crust wouldn’t wilt in the endless cloud I was driving inside. Glancing at the loaf in the passenger seat from time to time, my only companion on this long, dark journey, I thought of Tom Hanks’s soccer ball in Cast Away.
Except this boule wasn’t round. Hoping to impress the judges, I’d tried a variation on my peasant bread, making a large loaf leavened only with the wild yeast in the levain, which made it a true pain au levain. That meant using more levain to compensate for the absence of commercial yeast. Somehow I’d screwed up the baker’s percentage (perhaps not correctly accounting for the water already in the levain), and the dough for this two-and-a-half-pound boule had come out way too wet. As a result, when I flipped it onto the baker’s peel before sliding it into the oven, it flattened out almost into a pancake. I quickly slashed the moving target as best I could, then jammed it into the oven, where the hot baking stone stabilized the slithering mass into something resembling a flying saucer. I modified the label for the entry, turning my pain au levain into a pain au levain miche, hoping to salvage some of the 30 points awarded for appearance.
I had already written off the 20 points awarded for texture because the judges apparently had a strong, preconceived notion of what bread texture should be, the contest rules stating that “the texture should be moderately fine, even-grained.” In other words, the very opposite of what I’d spent the past six months trying to achieve.
Zach came in a few minutes later, surprised to smell bread baking at ten o’clock at night. I explained that I wanted the loaf to be fresh for the fair tomorrow.
“Tomorrow’s the fair?” Sensing my gloom, he broke into the theme song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair,* cracking me up. “That’s better,” he said. “Be happy! You’re going to the fair!”
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After four hours of driving, I finally reached the fairgrounds, and after two wrong turns, followed by an illegal U-tur
n in front of a state trooper (who gave me a break when he saw the loaf riding in the passenger seat), I found the culinary arts competition building and dropped the bread off a little after nine thirty. The woman who took it told me the judging would be completed by noon. I parked and, with several hours to kill, went to See the Fair, my first state fair ever. There was so much to see!
I saw lots of cows (spring calf, spring heifer, summer heifer, fall calf, winter yearling, spring yearling) being judged in a ring, teenagers leading the bovines around on a leash, which I found somehow touching and reassuring. They seemed like good kids, and I was thankful that there were still teenagers in this country, full of innocence and wonder, whose idea of a good time was leading a cow around a ring. Which made the following announcement all the more chilling.
“Attention: The ice man is here.”
“The iceman cometh!” I exclaimed out loud. Two women sitting in the bleachers next to me turned and looked quizzically. I decided I’d seen enough cows and excused myself.
I headed back to the culinary arts building, hoping that I could discreetly observe the judges at work. They hadn’t yet arrived, so I went back out to See the Fair.
I saw pigeons (archangel, parlor tumbler, American saddle muff tumbler, nun, jacobin, Lahore, frillback, Indian fantail, flying tippler, Chinese owl, American show racer, flying-type homer, show type king, damascene, swallow, Modena, English pouter, pigmy pouter, almond roller, bellneck roller, baldhead roller, show roller).
I saw geese (Toulouse, Emden, African, Sebastapol, American buff, pilgrim, Pomeranian, brown China, white China, Canada, and Egyptian, Roman tufted, African, Toulouse, and frizzle—“clean-legged only”).
52 Loaves Page 14
