Month: June 2011

Last night I made my classic mistake.  The one I’ve made, oh, say 8 times.  I don’t learn too quickly.  As I allow bread to rise, I usually keep it in the oven.  It’s the most draft-free place I can think of (it also keeps my cats out of things, and yes, they do enjoy bread).  There is the added benefit of keeping the oven slightly warm.  So I turn it on for a couple minutes while the bowl is in there.  But I often forget to turn it off.  I start doing other things and before I know it, there is the smell of melted plastic.  Saran wrap melting onto the bowl, into the dough.  It is a smell I know all too well.  Again and again and again I do this.

Last night’s stupidity was not treated gracefully or humorously.  It was met with a lot of profanity and self-flagellation.  And then I started my rye.  Again.

Yesterday I tried to make rye sourdough bread.  I didn’t find a recipe that I loved, so I sort of winged it. As a guide, I used my mother-in-law’s sourdough recipe, which yielded great results last time I used it.  When I followed it to a T.  I seem to remember reading that making rye bread includes a combination of wheat and rye flours, so I substituted white flour with half rye and half wheat.  Knowing that this would probably be a disaster, I at least had the sense to cut the recipe WAY down.  In fact, I quartered it.  Clearly I had no faith in my choice to abandon the script and improv.  I was right not to have faith.  Rye flour is very coarse, and even as I added it to my sponge, I knew I was weighing the dough down too much.  It rose.  And rose again.  But not much.  I put it in a loaf pan anyway.  And let it rise a little more.  I still had a tiny bit of hope that somehow it would miraculously rise enough to be edible.  It didn’t, and it wasn’t.  It was a brick.  I didn’t even cut into it.  Into the compost, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  Done.

So guess what’s rising as I write this?  Yes, another loaf of rye.  Again, I am adapting a recipe.  A no-knead bread recipe.  Instead white flour, I used a cup of rye and two of wheat.  Instead of rosemary and lemon zest, I added caraway seeds.  And I threw in a little more yeast than the recipe calls for.  I don’t have a lot of faith in this attempt either (I have already added rye bread to the grocery list), but I just have to try.

You see, I hate baking.  I do it all the time now, but I hate how precise I have to be in measuring things.  I can’t taste bread as I make it and adapt.  But I want to figure it out.  I have to find the middle ground between how I cook and how I think I have to bake.  A friend once told me that once you bake enough, you figure out how to adapt.  So I know it’s possible, and I know I’m impatient.  I also know that somewhere in a loaf of rye, I will find my answer.  And someday, I will enjoy baking.  Until then, I won’t give up.  Brick by brick, I will conquer this.

I recently left my job, and I now have a LOT of time to cook.  I have eschewed the “Meals-in-30-Minutes” trends and embraced a long drawn-out affair with ingredients and knife work.  Dinner prep has turned into a glorious 2-3 hour affair.  Not everyone’s dream, I know.  But it’s mine, and I’m living it.  Chuck often rolls his eyes as I start preparations for an 8pm meal at 4:30.  While his eyes head skyward, I think I see him licking his lips.

I also have a decent garden space now, so much of what I cook later in the summer will truly be a labor of love.  Seeds to Supper.  I have already successfully grown a couple kinds of lettuce and spinach, but most of my crops won’t be ready for quite a while.  In the meantime, I have plenty of farmer’s markets and a generous, green-thumbed mother-in-law to keep me supplied.

I’ll try to keep up with blogging, but every minute I’m writing is a minute I’m not cooking or gardening, so we’ll see.