The BackBou Returns

The BackBou has returned from a mostly very enjoyable trip to the Pacific Northwest which included a great many colorful culinary experiences, virtually none of which involved pizza or bread and only one of which involved an episode of food poisoning wherein the BackBou mysteriously passed out making his way to the campground toilets. Awaking on a carpet of dewy grass, clutching one's roiling stomach in the wee hours of the morning on a remote island in Puget Sound is a once in a lifetime experience which I cannot recommend.

On happier note, my starter weathered my absence well and last weekend produced four nice crusty loafs with a fine oven spring (see above). Perhaps she needed the vacation as well.

My chief culinary observation from the trip was, in a word, gooseberries. I don't know if I'm just that far removed from the culinary scene these days or if its a Pacific Northwest thing, but this was new to me. Three very different establishments served gooseberry garnishes on both sweet and savory dishes. For those of you less well-versed in the gooseberry it looks just like a yellow tomatillo -- which is in fact a type of gooseberry. For those of you not familiar with the tomatillo, well ... go on out an' git you one, fools! At the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, BC, high tea began with strawberries and clotted cream topped with a single gooseberry, its papery husk delicately peeled back -- as much a pleasure to eat as to look at. At Doe Bay Resort on Orcas Island, the very refined hippie establishment (a genre unknown in these parts) a chocolate truffle cake was adorned with a gooseberry. Lastly, at the Tin Wis Best Western in Tofino, BC, which is entirely owned on operated by the First Nations People, we were served a peanut soup accompanied by a gooseberry. When we expressed an interest in the gooseberry, the waiter presented us with a whole bowl. By the way, its the best Best Western you will ever stay at, should you get the chance.

Another culinary takeaway from the trip came from our Israeli hosts in Seattle who turned me on to a tea combination worthy of sharing. Add a teaspoon or two sweetened condensed milk to a cup of smoked tea -- I drink a Numi smoked Lapsang Souchong. Our friend explained that he came upon the combination in effort to duplicate some of the teas he had traveling in the Himalayas. I was immediately reminded of the teas I had in East Africa -- very sweet and slightly smoky because the kettles, heated over open fires, were permanently infused with a strong smoke flavor. In any event, I highly recommend it.

Next time, more on all the very fit naked people in hot tubs (see if that doesn't get a few hits).

Abe, the Pizzaiolo

So the weather never cleared on Saturday and I forewent firing the adobe oven up despite having four loaves-worth of dough ready for baking and four neo-neopolitan pizza doughs ready as well. I let the dough rise on sheet trays free form instead of using my plastic proofing baskets, and baked it off in my conventional gas oven with plenty of water added at various intervals for steam. Aside from foregoing the proofing baskets, I prepared the dough in exactly my normal fashion. I created a sponge the night before with my starter and finished the dough off the next day, leaving it to rise for the bulk of the day. Thus, the only difference was in the oven. The end result, however, was incredibly different. The gas oven does not give me anywhere near the same "oven spring." As a result, the crumb is much denser, more cakey and less chewy and translucent. Very interesting.

The gas oven is a lot more forgiving with the pizza, however. As Abraham Lincoln, who learned to cook pizza on the back of an old shovel used to say, "Really great pizza is really hard to make, but really good pizza is really easy to make."

Typos!

I am forever indebted to Anon for pointing out the glaring typo in my subtitle. The correction has been made -- though I hadn't really looked at the subtitle in a while (obviously) and am now considering changing it all together. Something like, the "Wistful Musings of a Flamboyant Ballet Dancer." Thoughts? Reactions? Proposed edits?

Thank You Mr. Science

The BackBou would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Science (or is it "Bigfoot"?) for his very illuminating comment on Jewish bread traditions. Challah french toast sounds like a fine idea as does anything with icing and sprinkles. Matzo with chicken schmaltz, I'm guessing, is better than it sounds. I picture a dry cracker with frypan grease spread on the top. Rendered duck fat I can handle, but chicken fat makes me raise a questioning eyebrow. One day -- I am sure -- someone will disabuse me of this bias, but for now, I'm sticking to it.

The combination of your post, which referenced "bubbe's challah," and my recent viewing of Waiting for Guffman has got me singing "Myyyyyy Bubbe made a kishka, she made it big and fat, my father took one look at it and said 'I can't eat that!'" It streams from my mouth at the most inopportune times -- in whispered but audible tones at the urinal, before meetings as we stare at our laptops waiting to come to order. I am getting looks.

Myyyyyy bubbe made a kishka ........

Mon Nom

A lot you have been asking questions about my nickname, "BB." I hope I won't offend you by trying address all your concerns in this one post. What most of you seem to want to know is this: how do I pronounce it? When I am lounging about Chateau BB pondering my next baking pursuit, does the staff here call out for me in an anglicanized "Bee-Bee" or the more chic francophone "Bae-Bae." It's as good question as has ever been posed by my readership and one whose answer -- truth be told -- is a tad upsetting. You see I suffer the insult of inconsistency not only among the media but even here in my own backyard.

Thus it is that, on the (expensive) advice of my PR team, we are rolling out a new nickname. Hence forth, I shall be called The BackBou -- not be confused with the BackBoil or the BackHair --they have their own blogs.

Chapati

I made a batch of whole wheat chapati, which confirmed my suspicion that brick/adobe ovens really are very well-suited to this type of unleavened flatbread. Coincidence? I think not.

I have battled in conventional ovens to make these little buggers work out. You end up opening and closing the oven door every ten seconds to see how they are doing and its hard to get the bread to get that nice mottled browning that comes from the intense retained heat and adds to the flavor. In an adobe oven its a piece of cake (though that seems a strange idiom).

These recipes are as simple as can be. (Here is another) Mine was something like 3 cups whole wheat flour (I used King Arthur) to a cup of water and some salt per 6 breads. You mix the stuff up, let it sit for an hour or more, divide into balls, roll 'em thin (8 inches, or so) and then throw them into a hot oven with tame fire burning in the back. Within a minute they puff up. You turn them once, pull 'em out and brush 'em with clarified butter.

Eaten shortly after baking they are incredible. I can honestly say that for some reason, I never really enjoy the flavor of whole wheat in any other bread the way I do in a hot chapati. You can reheat them the next day, but they are never quite the same.

The BB buys a BMW

Totally unrelated to baking and out of character in all respects, the BB has acquired a 1996 BMW 318ti (with only 39k miles). Fortunately, this is the red-headed step child of the BMW family, which means that the BB can retain his street creds and still enjoy the product of uptight German engineering. It may come as something of a shock to my readership of two that the BB has street creds at all but, well, we can't reveal all the juicy stuff in one post now can we?

And now, back to the bread. I made more of it last weekend. Pizza too.

Oh! This is of note ... two weeks ago the BB's spouse fired up the oven on her own for the first time. The oven was prepared for baking when the BB returned from work, which was very exciting for all.

It has a sunroof too!

The BB visits NY

Well I had another successful bake with the Wheat Montana product. I backed off the hydration of the dough and did not proof it for as long and the end result was better. The crumb was a little tighter (which it really needed) and the exterior a little darker (which it did not need).

Anyway... I spent Monday and Tuesday in NY and had the good fortune to be taken to Nobu Fifty Seven, which is the product of innovative Japanese Chef Nobu Matsuhisa's partnership with Drew Nieporent and Robert De Niro. After some nice Edamame and some brightly flavored green tea we opted for the hundred-dollar-a-person tasting menu (which is the less expensive option -- the other is $150). Probably the combination of the fact that I wasn't paying and the truly awe-inspiring fare made this a stand out culinary experience for me. We must have had about seven courses, the majority of which seemed to include bizarre Asian fruits or exotic wild species of fish. Some of the combinations were unique and yet so perfect that although I would never have dreamt of them, they seemed almost obvious as soon as I tasted them (e.g. wild yellow tail (kampachi) with raw jalapeno and thinly sliced garlic).

The next day we hit the Carnegie Deli for some much less sophisticated but nevertheless time-honored fare. I have to say, the pastrami is incredible but why does the bread have to be such an after thought? Wouldn't real bread and not some bagged rye be that much better. Is there a Jewish deli tradition that builds on good bread? Can my readership of two address this question please.

New Flour

I've begun to experiment with a new flour called Wheat Montana, which is available mail order and also at a local grocery store near my home. I purchased a 10 pound bag of Natural White Premium Flour, which is a high protein flour designed for "superior" bread baking. One thing that interests me about this flour is the additionn of a small amount of malted barley. This is something recommended by the inestimable Peter Reinhart in Crust & Crumb. According to Simon Quellen Field's web page on ingredients:

Malted barley flour is often added to bread because it gives the yeast more nutrients (primarily sugars), and gives the bread a different taste. Malting a grain is the process of letting the grain soak in water until it starts to sprout. The young sprouting barley plant converts some of the starch in the barley endosperm into sugars. The barley is then cooked or ground into flour, which stops the sprout from eating the sugars, leaving them available to the yeast.

I paid about $6.00 for ten pounds but it sells for $3.97 by mail. The shipping cost might kill the discount, although I expect the 50 pound bag at $17.50 -- even with shipping -- would result in some savings. Of course, this all assumes that the product warrants it.

To date, I have been a pretty strict advocate of King Arthur unbleached bread flour. It runs around $2.70 for 5 pounds locally and is consistently excellent to work with. I am not exactly eager to abandon King Arthur but would like to experiment some to see how other flours effect texture and taste. If I can get a cheaper product that is equal to or better than King Arthur, I'll probably make the substitution permanent.

I made a batch of Peter Reinhart's neo-neopolitain pizza dough, my standard, out of the Wheat Montana. It turned out very nicely. Of course, its hard to know how much is attributable to the flour and how much might be attributable to the stars aligning -- i.e. just the right mix of retained heat and refractive heat from the fire. I also made a batch of sour dough bread using my starter. It was a wet dough -- high hydration -- and the end result was a little curious. Very large air bubbles and a somewhat translucent chewy crumb. Very tasty but a little on the eccentric side as far as texture goes. Still too early to say whether the malted barley did anything.

Experimentation to continue.

Starter

Two summers ago, I built an adobe wood-fired oven in my very suburban Virginia backyard. The oven is the fruit of a seed planted a long, long time ago in a far away place, before bar exams, grey suits and ankle biters. There, in that seemingly distant world, I toiled in the sweaty kitchens of Charlottesville's short lived eateries. Under the tutelage of one Laura Brennan, now chef owner of Cafe Umbria, and a string of surly chefs that came and went thereafter, I got my first taste of coaxing food from a wood-fired oven. After a handful of years, I tossed my last soiled chef coat into the restaurant laundry bin, cleaned up a bit and wandered off to law school, whereupon the seed -- among other things -- promptly went dormant.

Then, I got married.

George Schenk of American Flatbread in Waitsfield Vermont, catered my rehearsal dinner. I watched in somewhat distracted amazement, as George and his crew constructed what he calls a "festival oven" in the meadow in front of my folk's house. Watching the process and sampling the end-product provided enough inspiration for the seed to germinate.


American Flatbread









But the germination was slow and years went by. Finally, I stumbled across a yahoo group dedicated to brick ovens. There, I was introduced to Kiko Denzer and his book Build Your Own Earth Oven. That year, Santa brought me Kiko's Book and Alan Scott's Ovencrafter's book, and that was it. Well ... almost. I am incapable of initiating any project without months of agonizing and this was no different. Anyway, I finally built the thing.

The purpose of this blog is largely selfish (as if that distinguishes this blog from most). I hope to keep a record of my baking pursuits for my own benefit and for any others that are interested.