I had a serious bread fail today. My bag of spelt flour was inexplicably filled with rye (I should have guessed from its distinctive gray color), a flour with entirely different baking properties that turned the rosemary polenta dough into a sticky mess that in turn baked into unattractive discus-shaped loaves. They taste just fine, but damn, they're ugly. Just as every beautiful batch of bread lifts my day as I unload it from the oven, every failure drops me with disappointment. I wonder sometimes if I'm too emotionally entangled with my bread, but having so much personally invested in the work is an excellent motivator, so for now I'll let myself and self-worth rise and fall with the dough.
The rest of the bake, fortunately, went smoothly, including the new and totally seasonally inappropriate market special. Crabby oats! Despite its grumbling-white-bearded-farmer of a name, it's actually lovely, scented with spiced crab apple butter and toothy with (lactofermented!) steel-cut oats. I felt slightly sacrilegious making such an autumn-inspired bread in the blazing heat of summer, but you can eat it in the cool morning. With a generous smear of butter. More summery is this week's tart: fresh blackberry with a lavendar Earl Grey pastry cream. I don't have any pictures because I'm picking the berries on my way to market tomorrow, but I promise they'll be pretty, as well as delicious. Come by the market to taste my experiments and to jeer at my sad rye-rosemary. Until tomorrow, I really did think I'd get this newsletter out on time this week. I finished early in the kitchen both yesterday and today (hurray for efficiency!), but somehow I kept finding distractions. There was a tart to make with the wild berries Andy brought down from the mountain, and a review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' memoir to read, and then the call of the lambs quarter growing rampant among the squash in my garden was impossible to resist, so I had to make squash blossom, lambs quarter tamales (with farmer's cheese, arugula and cilantro blossoms, and Alex's mushrooms!). There were dishes to wash, plums to shake down from the neighbor's tree, Instagram pictures to scroll through, a moderately uninformed conversation about Greece that led me to this excellent blog post, and endless other interesting and delicious things pulling at my attention, until, suddenly, I discovered it was 8:30 on Friday night and I hadn't started writing. Oy vey. We went out to Hannah's Blueberries the other day—if you haven't been, it's a beautiful mess of a U-Pick with huge, un-managed, ancient, blueberry bushes of unknown variety and varied productivity—where I picked twenty five pounds of berries in two and a half hours. I'm sure the Sakuma workers pick that in a minute, but ten pounds an hour seemed like a lot to me. Most of those are packed up in gallon ziplocks in the chest freezer, but I saved a few (pounds) out for pastries. This week's special market treat is a lime and blueberry tart. The tarts are very tart, and just a little spicy. There's a mystery spice in the lime curd. If you can guess it, your next tartelette is free! My kraut from last week fermented in record time, so I'm also breaking out the kraut bread I was daydreaming about last week. It's a light rye (which means low ratio of rye:wheat flour), with a bit of caraway and juniper, and a killer pink color. If you're celebrating the weekend heat at the grill, this bread would be fantastic with your brats.
All right. It's time to eat those tamales. See you tomorrow. After market last weekend we went out to the islands for a few days of food and family. Sunday night we dragged the kayaks down to the beach. All along the spit the mast lights floated above the moorings; the moon hadn't yet risen, or else it was hidden by the smoke from the Vancouver Island fires. Every footsteps in the wet sand exploded with glitter. Each paddle stroke left trails of light. The scattering fish beneath us were like silent fireworks. I was wildly grateful to be there, with friends, in the presence of summer magic, full up with wonder. Wonderful. Somewhere in her collected works Mary Oliver must have a poem that captures the astonished joy of bioluminescence. I came home to find my garden settling into summer, despite my neglectful watering habits (who waters their garden in June?). I finally had enough excess after the dinner harvest to fill up the fermenting crock, making my first kraut of the season. This one's an opportunistic mash up of green and purple cabbage, beets, a bit of fennel, the last of the scapes, and a pinch of caraway and juniper. And salt, of course. I love lactobacilli! They make everything better. What do you think about a sauerkraut sourdough bread? Maybe a light rye? I think it could work. Especially if the kraut were purple and made purple bread! I also harvested my garlic and trimmed back the blooming herbs. As a result, I've replaced the Ancient Grains with a harvest special this week: roasted garlic herb bread. Yes, it's delicious. Come get one at the market tomorrow!
I had bread left over from market last week, enough to barter for my week's groceries and still take home a sack. I've been struggling since I stopped sprouting grain (too hot!) to find a new way to get smoke into the smoky vollkornbrot. I've tried all sorts of alternatives to smoking the sprouted grain—dry flour (ineffective), flour slurries (messy), coarsely sifted flour slurries (still messy)—but this week all I had to do was slice up the old rye bread and throw it in the smoker. No sticky, wet rye flour, no dry, unreceptive grain. It was so easy I'm tempted to make extra bread just to recycle into the smokey bread, but that would, I think, be an unnecessarily complicated solution to the problem. Still, if you happen to have experience smoking food, and any better ideas for the weeks when I don't have such an overabundance of bread, please share!
|
BY SUBJECT
All
|