The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [12]
Back home I round my loaves more gently and find that they bake higher and with a more varied texture. But they still look like my bread, not like Noel’s. A warmer rising temperature sometimes helps and sometimes doesn’t. And my chef is simply not active enough to use the proportions that Noel does.
I turn to Michael London. From 1977 to 1986 Michael and his wife, Wendy, ran a patisserie in Saratoga Springs, New York, called Mrs. London’s Bake Shop—Craig Claiborne once compared their creations favorably to Wittamer’s in Brussels and Peltier’s in Paris—and now from the makeshift kitchen of their Federal-period brick farmhouse in nearby Greenwich they run the Rock Hill Bakehouse, where they bake three times a week. I cannot count the mornings I have rushed down to Balducci’s or over to the Greenmarket to buy a giant loaf of Michael’s Farm Bread before it all disappears.
An unstable and sweltering little plane carries me to upstate New York. I am bearing my latest loaf of bread and a Baggie filled with four ounces of chef. Avis refuses to rent me a car on the flimsy pretext that my driver’s license has expired. Who has time to renew one’s license, I ask, when the dough may overrise while I am waiting on line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau and later collapse in the oven? I lose the argument, but an hour’s taxi ride costs little more than Avis’s typically inflated charges. I arrive at the Londons’ farm in late afternoon.
Michael and Wendy critique the loaf I have brought. Then we eat it with butter from their cow. Their percipient and blond seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, loves my bread.
I watch Michael make his levain, and he shows me how to invigorate my starter. As you build the dough from one stage to the next, the chef, the levain, and the dough should always be used just at the peak of their activity. We sleep for a few hours, wake at one in the morning, make a ton of dough, sleep until five, when his four helpers arrive, and begin shaping loaves for the final bake.
Michael builds my four ounces of strengthened starter into levain—and then into twenty pounds of dough. He bakes several loaves with it, and they look just like Michael’s other breads, not like mine at all. The secrets, it seems, lie in the baker’s hands, his art and intuition, not just in the bacterial composition of the air, the flour, or the grapes. A fantastically expensive professional French hearth oven does not hurt either.
Thursday, September 6. My baking schedule has become less frenzied, twice a week now, and my wife eagerly awaits the finished product. My chef is happy and strong and aromatic, the man from UPS has got used to lugging fifty-pound bags from Giusto’s every week or two, and I have vacuumed most of the organic bread flour out of my word processor. Most days the bread is more than good enough to eat, and some days it is so good that we eat nothing else.
November 1990
Staying Alive
Years ago I read somewhere that the absolutely cheapest survival diet consists of peanut butter, whole wheat bread, nonfat dry milk, and a vitamin pill. Eager to try it, I rushed to the supermarket, returned home with provisions for a week’s survival, and went to work with my calculator and butter knife. Two generous tablespoons of peanut butter spread on a slice of bread and washed down with half a glass of reconstituted milk added up to 272 calories, including 13.6 grams of protein, 15.3 grams of fat, and a good quantity of fiber and complex carbohydrates. In a day filled with eight glossy open-faced peanut-butter sandwiches and four cool, foamy glasses of milk, I would consume 2,200 calories and many more than the 60 grams of protein an adult needs, and the vitamin pill would take care of the rest.
My new diet