The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [22]
A round of applause erupted in the small store, and smiles and nods were shot at me from everyone at the bake-off. Hooray!
“Next, the award for best texture is ...” Taylor double-checked a couple of scattered papers. “Mine.”
We all cheered again. The next award, for best flavor, was handed over to the contestant with the semolina and golden raisin-studded loaf.
“Now we have to take a final vote for the best overall loaf in the contest!” Taylor announced. I managed to dip another two or three slices of bread into olive oil before casting my ballot in the mason jar on the counter. I couldn’t get enough of that golden raisin-studded bread; that one got my vote in the best-overall category.
Taylor shook up the jar and then poured all the papers out of it.
“Let’s see!” she cried. “Oh, one for the peppercorn bread! Peppercorn again! Whole wheat! Another for the whole wheat! Ooh, semolina raisin!”
Taylor continued to unfold the ballots and put them into stacks, though less verbosely as she went on.
“I think we have a tie!” she finally cried. “So best overall goes to the whole wheat by James, and Cathy’s peppercorn bread!”
After another round of applause, and a high-five with James, we were each given a new serrated bread knife with a decoratively etched handle still in its packaging, along with Brooklyn Kitchen refrigerator magnets.
I left the Brooklyn Kitchen that night with a bellyful of starch and an enormously satisfied ego. Who knew that my first attempt at baking a whole loaf of bread—not rolls this time, but a real, bready-looking loaf of bread—would make me a champion bread baker? I was the breadwinner. Or at least one of them that night.
But the real moment of triumph came a few months later. In that time, I had baked so many loaves of no-knead bread, it was hard to put a number on my variations to the recipe. There was always another use for two-day-old or three-day-old bread, too: to make fresh breadcrumbs, or to slice and layer in a casserole dish with sauce, cheese, and other ingredients much like sheets of lasagna. I had made cinnamon-raisin bread once, using Lahey’s no-knead recipe, and then I made French toast out of its slices when it had gone stale a couple days later. I made bread with a sprinkle of sea salt baked on its top crust, which Ben liked the most. In fact, every night that I pulled a fresh loaf of bread out of the oven, about half of it was gone by the morning, since Ben couldn’t stop eating the oven-hot slices slathered with butter.
I’d use the rest of these loaves for sandwiches throughout the week, or just pop them in the toaster for a quickie breakfast before heading off to work. After the first few tries, I stopped measuring quantities and just began stirring in enough water as the flour, yeast, and salt I’d sprinkled haphazardly into the bowl would allow to make it sticky. It didn’t matter—it might taste or rise a little differently each time, but it was still bread.
In any case, three months after the bread bake-off at the Brooklyn Kitchen, I walked down the street to my closest newsstand and bought a copy of Vogue. The fat issue contained one three-page story that I had spared the $3.99 for. It was written by Jeffrey Steingarten and titled “Easy Riser.” The day before, my friend Karol had tipped me off to the fact that it was out on the shelves. “Nice shout-out in the Vogue story,” she’d written me.
My heart was pounding as I opened the magazine, turned the glossy pages, and finally located the story, one of the last in the perfume-smelling issue. I read all about the food writer’s own trials with baking the recipe devised by Lahey. Steingarten came up with a few modifications to the no-knead bread recipe that Lahey had originally published in The New York Times. Then I came to the first mention of the Brooklyn Kitchen’s contest, stating simply that it had taken place. A few paragraphs down was another mention, and finally, in the author’s notes, was this one:
According to Marisa, most contestants at the bake-off