Table & Travel

For about three months now I’ve been mak­ing my own bread. The recipe I’m using is from a book called, Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day: The Dis­cov­ery that Rev­o­lu­tion­izes Home Bak­ing (St. Martin’s Press, 2007). The clunky title is some­what mis­lead­ing, because it doesn’t really take five min­utes, more like an hour and fif­teen min­utes, but most of this time is inac­tive. The premise of the book is that it’s pos­si­ble to make bread with­out all the knead­ing and ris­ing needed to make a tra­di­tional loaf. You sim­ply stir yeast with warm water,  mix with flour, then let the whole thing rise for 2–3 hours. The dough, which is quite sticky, is stored in a con­tainer in the refrig­er­a­tor. When you’re ready to bake it, you remove a chunk of the dough, sprin­kle flour on the top of it, shape the loaf, and pop it into the oven for thirty min­utes. The orig­i­nal recipe calls for 6 1/2 cups of unbleached flour, but I’ve been mak­ing the “Euro­pean Peas­ant Loaf” by sub­sti­tut­ing a half-cup of both whole wheat and rye flour.

 Being a tra­di­tion­al­ist I must say that I feel I’m some­what cheat­ing, but it makes a good loaf of bread and I’ve been enjoy­ing it. Vicki, who makes bread the tra­di­tional way, thinks it’s pretty good also. The authors of the book, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, have just come out with a new book, Healthy Bread in Five Min­utes a Day: 100 New Recipes Fea­tur­ing Whole Grains, Fruits, Veg­eta­bles, and Gluten-Free Ingre­di­ents—they love long titles. There’s also another new book out on no-knead bread, My Bread, by Jim Lahey of the Sul­li­van Bak­ery in Man­hat­tan. His recipe has been quite the rage ever since NY Times food writer Mark Bittman wrote about him in 2006. There’s no knead­ing, but his bread rises for about twenty-four hours before it  is cooked in a heavy pot. Reviews I’ve read about this recipe rave about the qual­ity and tex­ture of bread made this way. Maybe I’ll give it a try one of these days.

The gar­den pro­duced another plen­ti­ful bounty of toma­toes today. Cos­to­luto Gen­ovese, Zuc­chero, and Martino’s Roma, the first two from seeds pur­chased in Italy. These will be used in tomorrow’s batch of tomato sauce, but a later foray into the gar­den pro­duced my lunch. I sliced a Brandy­wine tomato, still warm from the sun, and placed the slices on top of a crunchy slice of freshly baked bread, added fresh basil and a dol­lop of hum­mus, then driz­zled it all with olive oil. Perfect!

Note: This was orig­i­nally pub­lished on Sep­tem­ber 26, 2009. In the switch to the new Word­Press site, for some rea­son it wasn’t uploaded.

One of my great joys in the veg­etable gar­den this year has been dig­ging pota­toes. We planted five bar­rels of pota­toes, includ­ing Red Pon­tiac, La Ratte, Yukon Gold, and Red Nor­land. I also planted some organic pota­toes I got at Whole Foods that sprouted very quickly so I threw them in the ground.

Yes­ter­day, I decided to have a good break­fast, which included pota­toes. So out I went to the gar­den and dug a few beau­ties, which were quickly diced and into a fry­ing pan not ten min­utes after they left the ground. Served with organic apple-smoked bacon and poached brown eggs, the were deli­cious, crisp on the out­side and creamy within—brilliant, as chef Jamie Oliver would say.

I men­tioned in one of my posts last week, that I had three boxes of organic toma­toes, Early Girl, that I pur­chased at the Great Basin Food Coop. On Fri­day, I got busy mak­ing tomato sauce for freez­ing. I used recipes in a arti­cle by Georgeanne Bren­nan that were in her arti­cle, “From Vine to Freezer — Tomato Sauce for All Year,” which appeared in the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle last July. I decide to take on all three recipes, Basic Tomato Sauce, Roasted Roma Sauce, and Roasted Heir­loom Tomato Sauce.

I began with the first one, which I cooked last week, with toma­toes from our gar­den. I sliced about twenty pounds of Early Girls, which filled the six­teen quart stock pot that Vicki gave me for my birth­day. They cooked on medium for about two hours, then I ran them through the food mill.

I did most of this in one day, the kitchen was roast­ing, prob­a­bly 100 degrees and floor was a mess and there seemed to be tomato residue every­where. Still, the results were fab­u­lous, I’ve put 60+ twelve-ounce bags of sauce in the freezer.