Thinking bready thoughts

There aren’t too many weeks that go by without my baking bread at least once, and usually more often. I am a strong believer in bread baking fitting comfortably into your day. Laurie Colwin in her beautiful book Home Cooking writes a fabulous essay on baking bread that pretty much sums up my attitude about bread baking. ( Parenthetically, my copy of the book was a stupendous house gift from my friend Anne.)

At this point challah, and pita and bagels and peasant breads and pizza are all comfortable parts of my bread baking repertoire. I adore sour dough bread. But each time I read a recipe for how to set up a sour dough starter my head starts to ache.

According to most of the books I have read setting up sour dough sounds like it is almost as much work as taking care of an infant.

Awhile back I took a book out of the library that promised a method for making home baked bread with a time expenditure of only twenty minutes per day. The method in the book described setting up a loose bread dough and setting it in the fridge under a loose cover and then taking out a baseball sized lump of dough and using that to form the bread.

I tried that method and perhaps I misunderstood the directions, but a bread made out of a baseball of dough was just not enough for my bread eating family.

Last week I sort of stumbled back into trying that method. I made the bowl of loose dough. When I pulled out the lump of dough to use. I kneaded in a generous amount of flour and then allowed the bread to rise. I added enough flour to the baseball sized lump to get a healthy sized loaf. I put the loose dough that was left back into the fridge. After a couple of days the dough mixture in the fridge began to sour. So last week we ate a batch of sour dough bagels.

I made one attempt to add a bit more flour and water to the bowl. it seemed to work.

The bread you see rising at the top of the page was a rolled loaf filled with caraway and raisins. It was slightly sour. I have made pita and round peasant loaves all from the same mix. It’s a nice, lazy way to make bread.

I’m still figuring this method out but once I get a clearer sense of what I am doing it will write out something that resembles something closer to a recipe, or at least something that someone who isn’t living inside my head can follow.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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