The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [9]
I weigh 42 grams of water and 67 grams of unbleached white flour, about a half cup, put them in a large bowl, and squish them together with the fingers of my right hand until the dough comes together into a rough ball. Poilâne has you keep your left hand clean for scraping the dough off your right hand with the blade of a sharp paring knife, which sounds silly until you try it any other way. One writer, who evidently has not read Poilâne, recommends tying plastic bags round the handles of your water faucets to avoid sealing them closed when the dough from your hands dries and hardens on them. Better to keep one hand always clean.
I knead the chef with extra flour on my wooden counter for two minutes, put it into a rustic brown ceramic bowl, cover the bowl with a clean, wet kitchen towel, secure the towel with a rubber band, and go about my business. This nonchalance lasts for five minutes, and then I am back in the kitchen, peeking under the towel to see if anything is happening. Twenty peeks and several broken rubber bands later, I scrape the chef into a clear glass bowl. It looks less like something from a French farmhouse but does facilitate obsessive observation.
I wash my rustic bowl in hot water and learn a lasting lesson: utensils coated with flour or dough are easily washed in cold water; hot water makes the starch and gluten stick to everything, including itself. If the dough has hardened, soak the utensils in cold water. If you leave them long enough, your wife may get disgusted and clean them up herself. Do it too often and there will be a price to pay.
Where the side of the glass bowl meets the base, it swells and acts as a magnifying glass. For the rest of the day, at three-minute intervals, I search for the appearance of tiny bubbles in the chef.
Two Stars for Bread
It is not possible to understand a meal without bread, wrote a French savant whose name I forget. Any restaurant review that fails to evaluate the quality of the bread is either incomplete or completely invalid; I can’t decide which. Fantastic bread can overcome an ugly restaurant with brutish service, recently defrosted desserts, and burned coffee.
Saturday, June 2, immediately after waking. In just twenty-four hours, the kitchen towel has grown dry and stiff, the dough has darkened and crusted over, and two spots of pale blue mold have appeared on it. This is not the life-form I had in mind.
I make the morning coffee and start all over. This time I use bottled springwater. New York City tap water is among the most delicious in the nation, but chlorinated water of any kind can inhibit the growth of yeast. And weeks later, when I grow attuned to small differences in the taste of my breads, I find that you can recognize things like chlorine in the crust, where flavors get concentrated. Distilled water lacks the alkalies and minerals that make water taste good and are said to contribute to a healthy rise and golden crust. Springwater is the answer.
Instead of Poilâne’s white flour I weigh out some stone-ground organic whole wheat flour: stone ground because I am under the mistaken impression that the metal rollers in large commercial mills heat the flour to temperatures that can kill wild yeast and bacteria; organic because pesticides and fungicides deal death to microbes; and whole wheat because if yeast do actually live on the wheat berry, it is on the outer bran layer that they will, I figure, be found. Instead of a colorful, charming kitchen towel, I use plastic wrap this time. It may prevent a friendly airborne microbe or two from settling on the chef, but it keeps the dough from crusting over.
Sunday, June 3. Is that a bubble in the chef or a flaw in the glass of the bowl? The chef still smells like wet whole wheat flour, nothing more.
Monday, June 4. The chef has swelled and smells tangy, somewhere between beer and yogurt! I am proud as a parent.
Tuesday, June 5. No further change. Maybe I have failed. Maybe my chef is dead. But it is time for Poilâne’s Step Two, doubling the earlier quantities and