A Tutorial for Sandy

Sandy had asked me to put together a recipe for the sour dough corn bread. So, here it is more or less.

This gloppy stuff is my starter. It began life as a loose bread dough yesterday. I didn’t measure, but I think I may have started with about two cups of water, a teaspoon of yeast, a table spoon of salt and one of brown sugar. Most of it got turned into yesterday’s excellent fennel loaf.

The remainder has been sitting in a small plastic bowl covered by a plastic shower cap in my fridge.You can see that I have added an assortment of grains to this starter. I can’t remember for sure but I think there is wheat germ and bran in there.

I then took out a lump of the starter to begin my next loaf. Most of the rest of the starter went back into the fridge after I added a bit more flour and water to the bowl.

I then got to work on the new loaf of bread. I added another tablespoon of brown sugar to starter in the bowl.

And then I added a tablespoon of salt.

I then added about a cup and a half or water.

Next in was about a cup of cornmeal. I kept adding flour and kneading until I had a coherent dough. It was a pretty heavy and dense dough. I covered it with a towel and let it rise for several hours.

A bread made with a commercial yeast will need two hours for the first rise. I have found that using the starter the bread does better with a long slow rise. I set up the dough after breakfast and didn’t form the dough until late in the afternoon.

I got a little fancy and rolled the dough into a rectangle, coated the surface with olive oil and then sprinkled Herbes Provencal on the dough and then rolled the bread up into a tight roll. I covered the dough with the towel and let it rise again for another couple of hours.

I baked it at 385 after coating the crust with oil.

This bread is crazy-good.

It’s now mostly gone. I had one slice. The bread eaters in this house went wild.

Making this bread takes a few sessions of about five minutes each over the course of the day. The loaf bakes for about 40 minutes. I suppose that I could pretend to my family that it is a huge undertaking to bake this bread or it’s many variants. There aren’t too many things in life that give so great a reward with so little effort.

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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