Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 12

So the next afternoon, after school, we drove to the Safeway, grabbed a shopping cart, and wheeled it down the long, chilly aisle of freezer cases holding the microwavable dinners. The choices were stupendous-almost stupefying, in fact. It took us more than twenty minutes just to decide among the bags of frozen Chinese stir-fry, the boxed Indian biryanis and curries, the fish-and-chip dinners, the multiflavored mac-and-cheese options, the j.a.panese gyoza and Indonesian satays, the Thai rice bowls, the old-timey Salisbury steaks, the roast-turkey and fried-chicken dinners, the beef Stroganoff, the burritos and tacos and fully loaded hero sandwiches, the frozen garlic bread and sliders, and the cheeseburgers preinstalled on their frozen buns. There were whole product lines targeted at women trying to minimize their caloric intake, and others at men looking to maximize theirs (the "Hungry Man" promises "a full pound of great-tasting food"), and still others aimed at kids dreaming of an authentic fast-food restaurant experience at home. I hadn't spent much time on this aisle in years, so had no idea just how many advances there had been in the technology of home-meal replacement. Every genre of fast food, every ethnic cuisine, every chain-restaurant menu item known to man and commerce now has its facsimile in the freezer case.

Judith was willing to go along with our dinner plans but declined to join us shopping for it. She had requested a frozen lasagna, and Isaac spotted a bright-red box of Stouffer's that looked halfway appetizing. Dubious about eating meat under the circ.u.mstances, I first checked out a vegan "chicken cacciatore" entree, but the lengthy list of ingredients-most of them ultraprocessed permutations of soy-put me off the mock meat. So I opted for an organic vegetable curry from Amy's that seemed fairly straightforward in composition; at least, I recognized all the ingredients as food, which is saying a lot in this sector of the supermarket. Isaac agonized for a good long time, but his problem was the opposite of mine: There were just too many tempting entrees he wanted to try. Eventually it came down to a call between the bag of P. F. Chang's Shanghai Style Beef stir-fry and Safeway's own frozen French onion soup gratinee. I told him he could get them both, as well as some frozen molten (sic) chocolate cookie he'd been eyeing for dessert.

The total for the three of us came to $27-more than I would have expected. Some of the entrees, like Isaac's stir-fry, promised to feed more than one person, but this seemed doubtful given the portion size. Later that week I went to the farmers' market and found that with $27 I could easily buy a couple pounds of an inexpensive cut of gra.s.s-fed beef and enough vegetables to make a braise that would feed the three of us for at least one night and probably two. (The variable, as ever, is Isaac's appet.i.te.) So there was a price to pay for letting the team of P. F. Chang, Stouffer's, Safeway, and Amy's cook our dinner.

I don't think it's boastful of me to say that none of these entrees did anything to undermine my growing confidence in the kitchen. True, I don't yet know how to engineer dishes that can withstand months in the freezer case, or figure out how to build little brown ice cubes of hoisin sauce, designed to liquefy just in time to coat the vegetables after they've defrosted but not a moment sooner. And nothing I learned from Samin could help me design the consecutive layers of cheese curds and croutons topping the chocolate-colored cylinder of frozen onion soup like a Don King fright wig.

So how did it all taste? A lot like airline food, if you can remember what that was like. All the entrees tasted remarkably similar, considering how far-flung the culinary inspirations. They were all salty and had that generic fast-food flavor, a sort of bouillon-y taste that probably can be traced to the "hydrolyzed vegetable protein" that several of the dishes contained. This is an ingredient-label euphemism for monosodium glutamate (MSG)-basically, a cheap way to boost the perception of umami. The dishes all tasted better on the first bite-when you might be tempted to think, Hey, not half bad!-than on the second or third, when those words would be unlikely to cross your mind. There is a short half-life to the taste of a frozen dinner, which I would peg somewhere around bite number three, after which the whole experience rapidly deteriorates.

Oh, but wait: I've skipped over the cooking, or not cooking, segment of our meal. Which you probably a.s.sumed, as I certainly did, would be nominal, and so not worth going into in this account. That is, after all, the reason people buy these frozen dinners in the first place, isn't it? Well, if it is they're sorely mistaken, because it took nearly an hour to get our entrees on the table. For one thing, you could only microwave one of them at a time, and we had four to defrost and heat, not counting the molten frozen cookie. Also, one of the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave: The various stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together pointlessly in the microwave. If we wanted the gratinee effect promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350F) for forty minutes. I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes!

Isaac didn't want to wait that long, so we ended up taking turns standing in front of the microwave. Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not enn.o.bling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.

Anyway, as soon as the first dish was hot, we swapped it out for the second, but by the time the fourth entree was hot enough to eat, the first one had gotten cold and needed re-nuking. Isaac finally asked permission to start eating his onion soup before it got cold again. The advent of the microwave has not been a boon to table manners. He was already down to the bottom of his bowl when Judith's lasagna emerged from the oven.

Microwave Night turned out to be one of the most disjointed family dinners we have had since Isaac was a toddler. The three of us never quite got to sit down at the table all at once. The best we could manage was to overlap for several minutes at a time, since one or another of us was constantly having to get up to check the microwave or the stovetop (where Isaac had moved his stir-fry after the microwave got backed up). All told, the meal took a total of thirty-seven minutes to defrost and heat up (not counting reheating), easily enough time to make a respectable homemade dinner. It made me think Harry Balzer might be right to attribute the triumph of this kind of eating to laziness and a lack of skills or confidence, or a desire to eat lots of different things, rather than to a genuine lack of time. That we hadn't saved much of at all.

The fact that each of us was eating something different completely altered the experience of (speaking loosely) eating together. Beginning in the supermarket, the food industry had cleverly segmented us, by marketing a different kind of food to each demographic in the household (if I may so refer to my family), the better to sell us more of it. Individualism is always good for sales, sharing much less so. But the segmentation continued through the serial microwaving and the unsynchronized eating. At the table, we were each preoccupied with our own entree, making sure it was hot and trying to decide how successfully it simulated the dish it purported to be and if we really liked it. Very little about this meal was shared; the single-serving portions served to disconnect us from one another, nearly as much as from the origins of this food, which, beyond the familiar logos, we could only guess at. Microwave Night was a notably individualistic experience, marked by centrifugal energies, a certain opaqueness, and, after it was all over, a remarkable quant.i.ty of trash. It was, in other words, a lot like modern life.

I thought about that at dinner the following night, when we sat down together to eat one of the pot dishes I'd made the previous Sunday. Duck, which I had braised following Samin's recipe, with red wine and sweet spices in my new terra-cotta pot. Since the dish had been in the fridge since Sunday, it was easy to skim off the fat before putting the pot in the oven to reheat. By the time the sweet smells of allspice, juniper, and clove began to fill the house, Isaac and Judith had gravitated to the kitchen; I never had to call them to dinner. I brought the pot out to the table, and began serving everyone from it.

The energies working on the three of us at the dinner table this evening were the precise opposite of the ones that had been loosed in the house on Microwave Night. The hot, fragrant ca.s.serole itself exerted a gravitational force, gathering us around it like a miniature hearth. It was no big deal, really, a family sharing a meal from a common pot on a weeknight, and yet at a time when so many of the forces working on a household are so individualistic and centrifugal-the screens, the consumer goods, the single-serving portions-it's a wonder such a meal ever happens anymore. It certainly doesn't have to, now that there are easier ways to feed a family.

There's something about a slow-cooked dish that militates against eating it quickly, and we took our time with dinner. Isaac told us about his day; we told him about ours. For the first time all day, it felt like we were all on the same page, and though it would be overstating things to credit that feeling entirely to the delicious braise, it would also be wrong to think that eating the same thing from the same pot, this weeknight communion of the ca.s.serole, had nothing to do with it, either. Afterward, when I lifted the lid from the pot, I was glad to see there would be leftovers for lunch.

Part III

AIRTHE EDUCATION OF AN AMATEUR BAKER

"There is not a thing that is more positive than bread."

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Bread is older than man."

-old Albanian saying

I.

A Great White Loaf

One way to think about bread-and there are so many: as food or Food, matter and Spirit, commonplace, communion, metaphor, and medium (of exchange, transformation, sociality, etc.)-is simply this: as an ingenious technology for improving the flavor, digestibility, and nutritional value of gra.s.s. True, the technology doesn't work for all gra.s.ses, mainly just wheat, and it really only works for the seeds of that particular gra.s.s, not the leaves or stems. So it's not quite as ingenious as the ruminant's system for processing gra.s.s. The cow carries around a whole other stomach for the sole purpose of fermenting all parts of all kinds of gra.s.s into usable food energy. Our single stomach can do no such thing, but when, about six thousand years ago, we learned how to leaven bread, we joined the gra.s.s eaters of the world in earnest, much to the benefit of our species (not to mention the gra.s.ses).

Ruminant or human, the advantages of being able to eat gra.s.s are many. Gra.s.ses occupy some two-thirds of the planet's landma.s.s and, among plants, are especially good at collecting solar energy and transforming it into bioma.s.s-"primary productivity," in the ecologist's jargon. Before we learned to eat gra.s.s directly, we availed ourselves of its energy by eating the ruminants that could eat gra.s.s or, sometimes, the predators that ate them. Yet second- or third-hand is a wasteful way to eat gra.s.s. Only about 10 percent of the energy consumed by an animal pa.s.ses up the food chain to an eater of that animal. (Among other things, a lot of that energy is "wasted" by the animal in trying to avoid being eaten.) In fact, for every step up a food chain (or "trophic pyramid"), 90 percent of the food energy is lost, which is why big predators are so much more rare than ruminants, which in turn are so much more rare than blades of gra.s.s.

Even as Paleolithic hunters we ate whatever gra.s.s seeds we could gather, but figuring out a way to consistently get enough of the little things to make a staple meal represented a momentous development for our species. (It may also have been an obligatory development, since we were running out of gra.s.s eaters to hunt.) Learning how to eat lower on the food chain gave us access to more solar energy than ever before, and by doing so allowed us to create many more humans than would otherwise exist. Agriculture-which consists mainly of growing edible gra.s.ses like wheat, corn, and rice-is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.

In working with edible gra.s.ses, our ancestors concentrated on collecting and eventually planting the biggest, most easily accessible seeds, since the seed is the most energy-dense part of the plant, and the only part that a single-stomached creature can readily digest. In time, the plants evolved to gratify our desires, developing ever-bigger seeds and refraining from "shattering"-dropping off the plant-in advance of harvest. We in turn altered the environment to suit the plants: tilling the soil and defending them from compet.i.tors-trees, weeds, insects, pathogens.

The new relationship between gra.s.ses and people led to evolutionary changes on our end, too, notably the ability to produce the enzymes needed to digest the starch in gra.s.s seeds. Yet the seeds of even these domesticated gra.s.ses go to some lengths to protect their precious cache of nutrients (intended to nourish their offspring, after all, not ours) and so require some degree of processing to unlock them, whether by soaking, grinding, boiling, toasting, acidifying, alkalizing, or some combination of these steps.

These rudimentary forms of "food processing" worked well enough for the first few thousands years of the agricultural era. Depending on the region, various kinds of gra.s.s seed were toasted on a fire or ground between stones and then boiled in water to create a simple mash-a porridge. The inert mush that resulted might not have made for inspiring meals, but it was simple enough to prepare, and nutritious enough to eat, providing us with the energy of starch as well as some protein, vitamins, and minerals. To make these mashes more appetizing, people would sometimes spread them on a hot stone to cook, creating a kind of unleavened flat bread.

And then, one day, once upon a time somewhere in ancient Egypt, probably about six thousand years ago, something seemingly miraculous happened to one of these porridges. We don't know exactly how it happened, but some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps one off in a corner that had been neglected for a couple of days, was no longer quite so inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: The spark of life had been breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge-call it dough-was heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an airy yet stable structure that resembled a sponge.

It must have seemed a miracle, for a food to double or triple in volume on its own, or at least appear to (prefiguring, perhaps, the miracle of the loaves that Christ would perform four thousand years later). Though that increase proved to be an illusion-the volume added was only air-the reality, once tasted, was almost as impressive. The food had acquired a whole range of interesting new flavors and a delicate texture that made it much more interesting to eat. Bread! In time people would discover that the new food was also more nourishing than the mash from which it was made, so in that sense the miracle of the multiplying loaves was real. No longer mere cooks-putting fire to plants and animals, or boiling them in water-the Egyptians were now the masters of a far more complicated (and in some ways more powerful) technology for transforming nature into nourishment. So was born bread baking, the world's first food-processing industry.

I really love good bread. In fact, even bad bread is pretty good. I'd much prefer to eat a slice of fresh bread than a piece of cake. I especially love the contrast between a rugged crust and a moist, tender, alveolate interior-the "crumb," as I've learned to call it, now that I've been hanging around bakers. Alveoli are what bakers call the pockets of air that make up the crumb. The gases trapped in those curvaceous voids carry much of the aroma of bread, that rich complex of scents-roasty-yeasty-hazelnutty and faintly alcoholic-that, to me, is more captivating even than the smell of wine or coffee. Though I see no reason why I should have to choose between them, since bread goes so well with both.

One reason to bake bread is to fill your kitchen with that aroma. Even if the bread turns out badly, the smell of it baking never fails to improve a house or a mood. People trying to sell their homes are often advised to bake a loaf of bread before showing it. The underlying idea here is that freshly baked bread is the ultimate olfactory synecdoche for hominess. Which, when you think about it, is odd, since how many of us grew up in homes where bread was ever baked? Yet somehow that sense memory and its a.s.sociation with a happy domesticity endure. The trick has helped move quite a few houses.

To fill my house with that wonderful air is not why I took up baking, however. Nor was it to eat good bread, a desire that today can easily be gratified by simply buying it from one of the many good bakeries that have sprung up in recent years. Baking is one case where outsourcing the work to professionals has served humanity pretty well for much of the last six centuries. (Except, perhaps, during the last century, aka the Wonder Bread Era, a notably bad time for bread.) No, I began baking bread as a way to learn what I could about how it is made and what it means to us-its enduring uncanny power. Few things are as ordinary as a loaf of bread, yet the process by which it is made is extraordinary-and still something of a mystery even to those who study it or practice it every day.

Compared with earlier and simpler methods humans have devised for turning plants and animals into foods-the roasted chunk of meat, say, or pot of stew, either of which an individual or a small group can pull off-a loaf of bread implies a whole civilization. It emerges only at the end of a long, complicated process a.s.suming settlement and involving an intricate division of human, plant, and even microbial labor. In addition to an agriculture and a culture of milling and baking, the loaf of bread depends on a nonhuman culture as well: It won't rise without the active contribution of some highly specialized living creatures besides the baker, the miller, and the farmer. The work of these yeasts and bacteria is the reason that the airy loaf of bread coming out of the oven cannot be inferred from a wet mash of powdered gra.s.s seed in the way that, say, a pork roast or stew can be inferred from a pig. By comparison, the delicate spongelike structure that rises in a loaf of bread to trap the gaseous waste products of those microbes has the complexity of an emergent system: something that is much more than, and qualitatively different from, the sum of its simple parts.

I took up baking because I was determined to know bread. If I somehow managed to bake a decent loaf along the way, great, but my impetus, quite frankly, was more journalistic curiosity than a deep-seated desire to bake my own bread. I simply wanted to get a feel for the process by getting my hands into dough at home and in any bakery that would have me. I had little reason to believe I'd be, or ever become, any good at it.

To the contrary. I had baked one or two loaves years before with only middling results, and had concluded baking was probably not for me. As a form of cooking, it seemed way too demanding-of exact.i.tude and of patience, neither a personal strong suit. Baking was the carpentry of cooking, and I've always gravitated toward pursuits that leave considerably more room for error. Gardening, cooking, writing, all are roomy in that way, amenable to revision and mid-course correction. Baking by comparison seemed unforgiving, not to mention mysterious. Leavening dough depended on managing unseen and unpredictable forces. The recipes looked daunting. Messy, too. Plus, all the books and the bakers I consulted told me I would need to buy a kitchen scale to measure out ingredients. In grams.

But I would do it for the book, to learn whatever I could about this most extraordinary ordinary food and gather enough material to write about it. Then I would put away my scale and move on to other things.

That's not what happened. Long after I gathered all the material I needed to write these pages, I'm still baking. In fact I've got a loaf in the oven now, and another proofing in a basket. I can't seem to stop. I've come to love the feel of the dough in my hands as it develops, the way, on the third or fourth turn, the inert, sticky paste begins to cohere and then gradually become elastic, as if sinews and muscles were forming inside it. I love (and a little bit dread) the moment of truth when I lower the oven door to discover how much "oven spring" (if any) my loaf has achieved. And I love the m.u.f.fled static the bread emits while it cools, as the interior steam crackles the crust during its escape, filling the kitchen with that matchless air.

And yet the breads themselves, while occasionally handsome and flavorful, have never quite lived up to the expectations that the baking process, with its admixture of magic and possibility, seems to inspire. The Next Loaf always promises to rise higher, taste more complex, caramelize more gorgeously, alveolate more idiosyncratically, and throw a more distinctive "ear" where I scored it. So there came a point in my education as a baker when an image of the perfect loaf took shape in my head. This was not just a visual image, either. I could imagine how this ultimate loaf would smell and taste and feel in the hands, too, the precise ratio of weight to volume-said volume having been exalted by a most spectacular oven spring. Now I'm not sure I'll be able to put away my kitchen scale until I've actually baked, and tasted, that perfect loaf.

The best bread I ever tasted was a big country loaf shot through with holes the size of marbles and golf b.a.l.l.s-easily more air than bread. It had a tough hide of a crust, very nearly burned, but held inside a crumb so tender, moist, and glossy it made you think of custard. There was something sensual about the strong contrast between these two realms-outside and inside, hard and soft. The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it. But I was at a dinner party in Oakland with people I didn't know very well, so I limited myself to eating as much of it as possible and asking questions about it. One of our hosts worked in San Francisco and had stopped by a bakery in the Mission District to pick it up on his way home. It seemed that the bread made at this bakery didn't come out of the oven till late in the afternoon, which explained why when I first tasted it the bread was still slightly warm.

When I started baking bread, this memorable loaf loomed large in my mind, as an unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a loaf to shoot for anyway. By then I knew the name of the bakery-Tartine-and the name of the baker-Chad Robertson. (I live in a part of the world where bakers can be celebrities.) Here and there I picked up bits and pieces of intelligence about the man. I heard that the reason the bread came out so late in the day was that he was a surfer; he wanted to keep his mornings free in case the waves were good off Ocean Beach. (This turned out to be only slightly apocryphal.) I read that he baked just 250 loaves a day, and refused to bake more, even though on most afternoons a line of customers snaking down Guerrero Street snaps up all the loaves before they have had a chance to cool. People phone ahead to reserve a loaf.

So it came as very good news when I learned that Chad Robertson was publishing a book that would reveal the recipe for his iconic country loaf. I managed to get hold of an advance copy of Tartine Bread. It was an unusually handsome volume, bound like a textbook with a cover that somehow managed to be simultaneously hard and soft-like his bread. I cracked the big book open, my sense of antic.i.p.ation rising. It quickly collapsed, however, as soon as I began reading the "basic recipe." The recipe started on page 42 and didn't arrive at the point of putting a loaf in an oven until page 69. Along the way were plenty of helpful pictures, mostly of dough but a few of Robertson himself shaping loaves. He looked to be in his thirties, slender, bearded, and monkishly intense. After the twenty-seven-page recipe came another ten pages t.i.tled "The Basic Loaf in Depth," a scientificoTalmudic explication of the principles behind the recipe. I was daunted. This was going to be a project.

Yet even if I had felt dauntless enough to jump in on it right away, I couldn't, not according to the recipe. I needed first to build a "starter"-a culture of wild yeasts and bacteria to leaven the bread, a process the book said could take weeks. Why not leaven the bread with instant yeast from the supermarket, as in most bread recipes? Robertson explained that a sourdough culture contributed not just air to a bread but much of the texture and the flavor-precisely what I felt was missing from my earlier efforts to bake bread. So, if I was really serious about this baking project, a starter was apparently somewhere in my future.

It would be a few weeks before I felt sufficiently mentally prepared to embark on my Tartine loaf. In the meantime, I built up to the undertaking by wading out into what turned out to be a deep, fermenting pool of online chatter inspired by the recently disclosed Tartine recipe. TheFreshLoaf.com, a chat group for amateur bakers, was abuzz with reports on people's earliest efforts to bake the legendary loaf, and on Facebook, somebody had started a page ("Recipes from Tartine Bread") to help hobbyist bakers struggling to master the recipe.

I noticed that most of the posts were from men, many of them sounding less like home cooks than twenty-something computer geeks trying to master a new software platform. (I found out later than in fact both the Web site and the Facebook group had been started by young Web developers.) Only a few of these amateur bakers had ever tasted the bread they were striving to emulate, but this didn't seem to slow them down-they had seen pictures and video. They posted pictures of their starters, Tupperware containers bubbling over with ma.s.ses of pearly glop-or, all too often, ma.s.ses of grayish slime that stubbornly refused to bubble at all. They compared notes on "feeding schedules" for their starters as if they were caring for new kittens. Portraits of finished loaves of every size, shape, and alveolation were posted, sometimes as boasts, other times as plaintive cries for help.

"How do you adjust when it's very humid?" went one. "It's 88% humidity here and I just experienced some impressive TBF." It took me a few visits to the page before I figured out that "TBF" was short for total bread failure. (PBF meant partial bread failure.) Someone else was struggling with a "cavitation" problem, and posted a cross-section picture, known in this subculture as a "crumb shot," of a loaf disfigured by vast caverns of air that had formed directly beneath the crust.

The chatter of the online bakers made me only more anxious about the prospect of attempting a Tartine loaf. Here was exactly what I worried about: baking as carpentry or, even more intimidating, computer code. Yet when I finally sat down to read through Robertson's entire opus, I was surprised to discover that the recipe read nothing like code. Instead of a precise set of instructions, he offered a fairly casual, open-ended set of guidelines. Sure, he specified how many grams of flour and water and starter to use, but after that, the recipe was more narrative than numbers. It left a lot up in the air. Robertson made ample allowance for the vagaries of weather and humidity, flour, and even one's personal schedule.

Robertson encouraged bakers to be observant, flexible, and intuitive. Rather than specify exactly how many hours the bulk fermentation stage should last, he offered a few indicators of dough development to look and feel for: Does the dough feel "dense and heavy" or "cohesive"? To someone accustomed to computer code or carpentry, this sort of advice must have seemed frustratingly vague and subjective. "If the dough seems to be developing slowly, extend the bulk fermentation time." Okay, but, by how much?! Robertson refused to say. "Watch your dough and be flexible." He talked about dough as if it was a living thing, local and particular and subject to so many contingencies that to generalize or make hard-and-fast rules for its management was impossible. Robertson seemed to be suggesting that success as a baker demanded a certain amount of negative capability-a willingness to exist amid uncertainty. His was a world of craft rather than engineering, one where "digital" referred exclusively to fingers.