The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [19]
Once we were full from dinner, and the beer bottles were all emptied and piled up in the heaping recycling bin, I remembered to check on the dough. I glanced at my watch—it was a little after ten o’clock. The towel was now draped across a round, protruding mass coming from the inside of the bowl. I lifted off the towel and stared at the balloon of bright orange before me. It was more alive! Now for that punching part ... I balled my hands into fists and gave the dough a gentle whack. The air trapped inside it escaped with a poof, and it slowly fell back to half its size. I had to admit, that was pretty satisfying, though I still wasn’t convinced there was any reason for blunt force, or the use of the word punch in this and so many other recipes I’d seen for bread when describing the same step. Was this some relic of a particular baker’s angst? Or a hand-me-down from generations upon generations of women in the kitchen, not socially allowed to express their true feelings toward their husbands in an open or direct manner?
Now that I was no longer hungry, I preheated the oven and patted the dough into balls. Twenty minutes or so later, I took the baked rolls out of the oven. They gave off a deliciously familiar odor, reminding me of all the times I’d walked down the street at night and suddenly caught a whiff of an industrial bakery doing its business. It was toasty and slightly pungent. And these rolls certainly looked like the real thing. The balls I had formed had expanded to soft, foamy mounds in the oven. They were still very orange inside but had a darker cast on their crusts as if they’d been bronzed in the sun.
Once they were cool enough to taste, I couldn’t tell the difference between these and countless other warm dinner rolls I’d had before. True to DJ’s word, they didn’t taste at all like squash, which held a mystery for me in itself. (Was the squash just a way of squashing more nutrition into your average dinner roll? Or was the intent to lend flavor, however ill-envisioned? Or was it for color?) All in all, this recipe was a success for me. I had created a breadlike substance at home, on the first shot. And the results were satisfying.
“Yummy!” Erin concurred.
I ate squash rolls for breakfast and snacks throughout the next week. I also wrote a post in my blog about DJ’s mom’s recipe, and moved on to other recipes and cooking experiments not involving bread for a couple of weeks.
Then an article in The New York Times caught my attention—along with that of the rest of the food-obsessed world. It was describing a “revolutionary” method of bread making developed by Jim Lahey, proprietor of New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery. It had been dubbed “No-Knead Bread,” and the key lay in two simple maneuvers: letting the dough rest for twelve hours or more before baking it, and heating up a heavy cast-iron pot as the vessel to bake the bread in. Lucky for me, I had recently acquired a bright red Le Creuset Dutch oven, which I had been drooling over for months. I had to put it to this fascinating new use.
Many, many other articles and food bloggers’ tales cropped up based on the intoxicating prospect of not kneading before I had the chance to blog about it. In general, they were giddy with raves about the process—how easy it was and what terrific bread it produced. I gazed at so many photos of loaves forged from this uberclever method that I almost didn’t want to give it a go—how could anything