The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [20]
The impetus finally came in an announcement. The Brooklyn Kitchen, a recently opened kitchen store whose husband-and-wife owners I had become chummy with, was holding a “No-Knead Bread-Off.” “Come bring your finest loaves using the recipe that has changed the way we think of bread,” the invitation from co-owner Taylor read. All right, I thought. It was time.
The thing I liked about Jim Lahey’s recipe, as published in The New York Times, was that it suggested a little more malleability than most published recipes. It wasn’t so much a recipe as a new theory on making bread. Therefore, when it said to let the flour, water, yeast, and salt rest covered for “at least 12 hours, but preferably around 18,” I decided to go the extra mile and begin my bread two days before the bake-off. I let it sit there, literally, for around forty-eight hours. I also used an alien ingredient: potato water. While boiling potatoes one day, I thought to myself, why pour all this starchy, potato-flavored water down the drain? I covered it and saved it for a day in the fridge. When I began mixing together my dough for the bake-off, the idea of using this instead of regular water popped into my head.
Thinking black pepper was a good accompaniment to potato, I decided to add some cracked peppercorns to the dough, too. I poured about a half-cup of whole black peppercorns into a Ziploc bag and pressed the air out before sealing it shut. I rolled over the bag with a wooden rolling pin several times, making indentations in the pin while crushing the peppercorns into coarse, cracked pieces. I stirred this into the flour, salt, and yeast in my Dutch oven and added as much potato water as the recipe instructed for regular water. I covered the pot and left it alone until the next day.
When I checked on the pot after coming home from work, I was immediately greeted with a funky, beery odor, about ten times stronger than that of the grayish fizz I had noted when mixing up the yeast for the squash rolls. It was powerful. The dough had spread to an even layer across the bottom half of the pot and was marked with tiny air bubbles on its surface. Studded with the cracked black pepper, it resembled a gooey, bubbling broth of some sort, only the bubbles were stationary, as if frozen in time. It wasn’t like anything I had seen or smelled before. I placed the cover back on the pot and left it there for another entire day.
The next night, I uncovered the pot again. The surface of the dough had dried slightly, but there were still air bubbles there. But this time, the stench was almost overbearing. A devastating thought hit me: The potato water had completely rotted. I had a fetid, rotting, decomposing pile of potatoes, flour, and peppercorns. Plus, the dough around each little piece of peppercorn was beginning to take on an unsightly brownish color.
But the bake-off was that night! What was I going to do? There was definitely no time to follow the recipe all over again.
Panicked, I wrote a desperate e-mail to Taylor from the Brooklyn Kitchen.
Um, I was just wondering: my bread smells really bad. I mean, really bad. I left it out for two entire days, instead of just twelve or eighteen hours. Do you think it went bad? Am I going to make people sick? Is there live bacteria in it that can harm someone? Should I not come to the bake-off at all, lest I impart some sort of contagion from myself even without bringing the gross bread?
Taylor wrote back a short while later.
I think it’s probably just the normal fermenting process. Yeast is a living thing, you know. Plus, I think a 450-degree oven should definitely kill anything harmful.
Somewhat appeased, I went on with the recipe. Taylor’s words made a lot of sense, when I thought about it from a scientific point of view I’d realized by then that bread making, or good bread making at least, had a lot more to do with actual science than with thinking about flavor combinations or other sensory details. I was never much