by Cathy Erway
Whoever came up with this system anyway?
It was alive!
I stared down at the bowl of dry active yeast, which I’d just mixed with warm water and sugar. It was bubbling and fizzy, but not in a familiar, Alka-Seltzer kind of way. More like a murky-gray-and-smelling-more-than-slightly-fetid sort of way. Active, I surmised.
I followed the next two instructions in DJ’s e-mail, swapping out a large saucepan in lieu of a mixing bowl big enough to fit everything in. After stirring the thawed package of squash together with the flour, milk, and yeast, I had a big pile of what looked like bright orange Play-Doh.
Turn it onto a floured surface and knead the rest of the flour in.
I dusted a cutting board with some flour and scraped up the orange putty with my hands. I played with the dough for a few minutes, rolling it into a ball and smushing it back onto the cutting board with the flat of my palm. The dough was so sticky that it stuck to my palm and spurted through the slats of my fingers as I worked. Stubbornly, the bits and pieces that coated my hands would never quite integrate back with the rest of the ball.
Form into a ball and place inside a greased bowl. Cover with a towel and let rise until double, about 2 hours.
That should be easy enough. I slicked butter inside Erin’s mixing bowl and plopped the dough ball into it.
The lock of the apartment door clicked and Erin walked through. A shuffle of plastic immediately followed her steps as she plopped her groceries on the floor to coddle the cat that was waiting for her.
“Want to make dinner?” she said as she came through the hallway.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said. “I’ve got stuff on the way, but it might take a while.”
“Good. I picked up some snacks,” Erin said.
By then it was about eight o’clock, and I was famished. I considered cooking the rest of the ingredients I’d bought for dinner and leaving the rolls for later, as a dessert. That was what I would have to do.
Erin shoved a bag on the kitchen counter. She took out a couple of avocados, a bag of tortilla chips, and a six-pack of beer. We spent the next couple of hours talking, listening to music, talking about the music, talking about our latest projects—my new blog-writing ventures and Erin’s songwriting ventures—and scraping chips against the sides of a bowl of guacamole. We cooked, too, roasting the chicken with simple seasonings in the oven and giving the Swiss chard a quick saute with garlic. Ben made his way over just in time for dinner. We had been dating for about a year, and we’d gotten into the habit of staying at one or the other’s apartment on most nights. Hence, I usually cooked dinner for at least two people—often three when I was at home and Erin was, too. But unlike Ben, Erin actually cooked fairly often, and she always shared whatever she was making if I was around.
Once we were full from dinner, and the beer bottles were all emptied and piled up in the heaping recycling bin, I remembered to check on the dough. I glanced at my watch—it was a little after ten o’clock. The towel was now draped across a round, protruding mass coming from the inside of the bowl. I lifted off the towel and stared at the balloon of bright orange before me. It was more alive! Now for that punching part ... I balled my hands into fists and gave the dough a gentle whack. The air trapped inside it escaped with a poof, and it slowly fell back to half its size. I had to admit, that was pretty satisfying, though I still wasn’t convinced there was any reason for blunt force, or the use of the word punch in this and so many other recipes I’d seen for bread when describing the same step. Was this some relic of a particular baker’s angst? Or a hand-me-down from generations upon generations of women in the kitchen, not socially allowed to express their true feelings toward their husbands in an open or direct manner?
Now that I was no longer hungry, I preheated the oven and patted the dough into balls. Twenty minutes or so later, I took the baked rolls out of the oven. They gave off a deliciously familiar odor, reminding me of all the times I’d walked down the street at night and suddenly caught a whiff of an industrial bakery doing its business. It was toasty and slightly pungent. And these rolls certainly looked like the real thing. The balls I had formed had expanded to soft, foamy mounds in the oven. They were still very orange inside but had a darker cast on their crusts as if they’d been bronzed in the sun.
Once they were cool enough to taste, I couldn’t tell the difference between these and countless other warm dinner rolls I’d had before. True to DJ’s word, they didn’t taste at all like squash, which held a mystery for me in itself. (Was the squash just a way of squashing more nutrition into your average dinner roll? Or was the intent to lend flavor, however ill-envisioned? Or was it for color?) All in all, this recipe was a success for me. I had created a breadlike substance at home, on the first shot. And the results were satisfying.
“Yummy!” Erin concurred.
I ate squash rolls for breakfast and snacks throughout the next week. I also wrote a post in my blog about DJ’s mom’s recipe, and moved on to other recipes and cooking experiments not involving bread for a couple of weeks.
Then an article in The New York Times caught my attention—along with that of the rest of the food-obsessed world. It was describing a “revolutionary” method of bread making developed by Jim Lahey, proprietor of New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery. It had been dubbed “No-Knead Bread,” and the key lay in two simple maneuvers: letting the dough rest for twelve hours or more before baking it, and heating up a heavy cast-iron pot as the vessel to bake the bread in. Lucky for me, I had recently acquired a bright red Le Creuset Dutch oven, which I had been drooling over for months. I had to put it to this fascinating new use.
Many, many other articles and food bloggers’ tales cropped up based on the intoxicating prospect of not kneading before I had the chance to blog about it. In general, they were giddy with raves about the process—how easy it was and what terrific bread it produced. I gazed at so many photos of loaves forged from this uberclever method that I almost didn’t want to give it a go—how could anything I made ever compete with these perfect, crackly-topped, fancy bakery-looking loaves of bread?
The impetus finally came in an announcement. The Brooklyn Kitchen, a recently opened kitchen store whose husband-and-wife owners I had become chummy with, was holding a “No-Knead Bread-Off.” “Come bring your finest loaves using the recipe that has changed the way we think of bread,” the invitation from co-owner Taylor read. All right, I thought. It was time.
The thing I liked about Jim Lahey’s recipe, as published in The New York Times, was that it suggested a little more malleability than most published recipes. It wasn’t so much a recipe as a new theory on making bread. Therefore, when it said to let the flour, water, yeast, and salt rest covered for “at least 12 hours, but preferably around 18,” I decided to go the extra mile and begin my bread two days before the bake-off. I let it sit there, literally, for around forty-eight hours. I also used an alien ingredient: potato water. While boiling potatoes one day, I thought to myself, why pour all this starchy, potato-flavored water down the drain? I covered it and saved it for a day in the fridge. When I began mixing together my dough for the bake-off, the idea of using this instead of regular water popped into my head.
Thinking black pepper was a good accompaniment to potato, I decided to add some cracked peppercorns to the dough, too. I poured about a half-cup of whole black peppercorns into a Ziploc bag and pressed the air out before sealing it shut. I rolled over the bag with a wooden rolling pin several times, making indentations in the pin while crushing the peppercorns into coarse, cracked pieces. I stirred this into the flour, salt, and yeast in my Dutch oven and added as much potato water as the recipe instructed for regular water. I covered the pot and left it alone until the next day.
When I checked on the pot after coming home from work, I was immediately greeted with a funky, beery odor, about ten times stronger than that of the grayish fizz I had noted when mixing up the yeast for the squash rolls. It was powerful. The dough had spread to
an even layer across the bottom half of the pot and was marked with tiny air bubbles on its surface. Studded with the cracked black pepper, it resembled a gooey, bubbling broth of some sort, only the bubbles were stationary, as if frozen in time. It wasn’t like anything I had seen or smelled before. I placed the cover back on the pot and left it there for another entire day.
The next night, I uncovered the pot again. The surface of the dough had dried slightly, but there were still air bubbles there. But this time, the stench was almost overbearing. A devastating thought hit me: The potato water had completely rotted. I had a fetid, rotting, decomposing pile of potatoes, flour, and peppercorns. Plus, the dough around each little piece of peppercorn was beginning to take on an unsightly brownish color.
But the bake-off was that night! What was I going to do? There was definitely no time to follow the recipe all over again.
Panicked, I wrote a desperate e-mail to Taylor from the Brooklyn Kitchen.
Um, I was just wondering: my bread smells really bad. I mean, really bad. I left it out for two entire days, instead of just twelve or eighteen hours. Do you think it went bad? Am I going to make people sick? Is there live bacteria in it that can harm someone? Should I not come to the bake-off at all, lest I impart some sort of contagion from myself even without bringing the gross bread?
Taylor wrote back a short while later.
I think it’s probably just the normal fermenting process. Yeast is a living thing, you know. Plus, I think a 450-degree oven should definitely kill anything harmful.
Somewhat appeased, I went on with the recipe. Taylor’s words made a lot of sense, when I thought about it from a scientific point of view I’d realized by then that bread making, or good bread making at least, had a lot more to do with actual science than with thinking about flavor combinations or other sensory details. I was never much good at science.
I arrived at the Brooklyn Kitchen later that night toting a large, round loaf of cracked peppercorn potato no-knead bread. The top had mushroomed to a beautifully browned crust, and a deep crack ran across the top. It was fascinating to look closely at this crust and see how the dough had stretched and baked solid just inside that crater. The small, tidy store was located on a quiet block in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, which, for better or worse, is known for its youthful hipster scene. I’d met owners Harry and Taylor while writing a piece on the store’s opening for a local magazine. They had spoken of plans to hold regular events, cooking demos, classes, and contests like this bread-off, and so far I had gone to almost every one of them.
A group of ten or twelve was clustered around the large counter, where six or seven different-looking loaves of bread were lined up on cutting boards. I was running a little late. I took my loaf out of the bag and handed it over to Taylor, who was slicing the others.
“Wow, looks great!” she said. Then she smelled it for a moment. “Ooh, I see what you mean!” She shrugged and placed it on a cutting board at the end of the table.
My bread, even baked, did indeed give off that fermented, beery smell, but somehow, it was a lot more appealing now that it had been baked. It smelled more or less like ... bread. Like that smell when you’re walking past an industrial bakery. Only now, it was tinged with a peppery spiciness.
Taylor began slicing up pieces of my loaf to put out for everyone.
“What’s that?” a few people approached me to ask. When I told them it was just black pepper, their eyes widened, and they eagerly reached for slices.
“This is awesome. Whoo—that pepper is spicy!” said a tall, older man, who had for his part baked a delicious semolina loaf with golden raisins embedded in the dough. I liked my bread, too, which was pleasantly savory and had an airy texture inside and a crackly crust; each bite seemed to have a different-sized explosion of black pepper. I also chatted up my friend Bob, who had baked a rosemary-crusted loaf with olive oil brushed on top before it went into the oven. Taylor had baked a dark, crusty pumpernickel loaf using the no-knead recipe, which tasted earthy and spicy at the same time. I also enjoyed a whole-wheat loaf with cracked grains visible throughout its surface. I ate slice after slice of bread as I mingled with the other contestants and attendees. I’d seen a few of them around at previous events, but most were strangers. Taylor put out an assortment of flavored olive oils to dip the breads in, and a couple of bottles of wine.
“What was in your bread again?” a girl with blond hair and a pink sweater asked me. I told her the ingredients in mine, including the day-old water left from boiling potatoes. She took it down clearly in a notebook, beside a page’s worth of notes on all the other breads in the bake-off.
“Are you writing about this for something? A magazine?” I asked her.
“Yes, for Vogue,” she replied.
“Oh, cool,” I said.
“I’m Jeffrey Steingarten’s assistant,” she added.
I stopped chewing.
“He really wanted to come out to this, but he couldn’t make it. So he sent me to check it out,” she went on.
“Cool,” I repeated, looking at her as if I were looking at a fairy messenger from God.
She introduced herself as Marisa and told me that her boss was writing a piece on Jim Lahey and his no-knead bread for the magazine. She pulled out a business card of Jeffrey’s and wrote her e-mail address on the back before handing it to me. I told her I’d look out for the article and wrote down the name of my blog and my contact info on a spare piece of paper (for lack of a business card), telling her that I’d be happy to help answer any questions. Marisa had to leave before the contest winners were announced that night, but she took off with small slices of every loaf of bread in the competition.
“I think we can declare a winner for the ‘best overall bready appearance’ category,” Taylor said, after counting all the folded-up papers spread before her on the counter. “It’s the peppercorn one.”
A round of applause erupted in the small store, and smiles and nods were shot at me from everyone at the bake-off. Hooray!
“Next, the award for best texture is ...” Taylor double-checked a couple of scattered papers. “Mine.”
We all cheered again. The next award, for best flavor, was handed over to the contestant with the semolina and golden raisin-studded loaf.
“Now we have to take a final vote for the best overall loaf in the contest!” Taylor announced. I managed to dip another two or three slices of bread into olive oil before casting my ballot in the mason jar on the counter. I couldn’t get enough of that golden raisin-studded bread; that one got my vote in the best-overall category.
Taylor shook up the jar and then poured all the papers out of it.
“Let’s see!” she cried. “Oh, one for the peppercorn bread! Peppercorn again! Whole wheat! Another for the whole wheat! Ooh, semolina raisin!”
Taylor continued to unfold the ballots and put them into stacks, though less verbosely as she went on.
“I think we have a tie!” she finally cried. “So best overall goes to the whole wheat by James, and Cathy’s peppercorn bread!”
After another round of applause, and a high-five with James, we were each given a new serrated bread knife with a decoratively etched handle still in its packaging, along with Brooklyn Kitchen refrigerator magnets.
I left the Brooklyn Kitchen that night with a bellyful of starch and an enormously satisfied ego. Who knew that my first attempt at baking a whole loaf of bread—not rolls this time, but a real, bready-looking loaf of bread—would make me a champion bread baker? I was the breadwinner. Or at least one of them that night.
But the real moment of triumph came a few months later. In that time, I had baked so many loaves of no-knead bread, it was hard to put a number on my variations to the recipe. There was always another use for two-day-old or three-day-old bread, too: to make fresh breadcrumbs, or to slice and layer in a casserole dish with sauce, cheese, and other ingredients much like sheets of lasagna. I had made cinnamon-raisin bread once, using Lahey’
s no-knead recipe, and then I made French toast out of its slices when it had gone stale a couple days later. I made bread with a sprinkle of sea salt baked on its top crust, which Ben liked the most. In fact, every night that I pulled a fresh loaf of bread out of the oven, about half of it was gone by the morning, since Ben couldn’t stop eating the oven-hot slices slathered with butter.
I’d use the rest of these loaves for sandwiches throughout the week, or just pop them in the toaster for a quickie breakfast before heading off to work. After the first few tries, I stopped measuring quantities and just began stirring in enough water as the flour, yeast, and salt I’d sprinkled haphazardly into the bowl would allow to make it sticky. It didn’t matter—it might taste or rise a little differently each time, but it was still bread.
In any case, three months after the bread bake-off at the Brooklyn Kitchen, I walked down the street to my closest newsstand and bought a copy of Vogue. The fat issue contained one three-page story that I had spared the $3.99 for. It was written by Jeffrey Steingarten and titled “Easy Riser.” The day before, my friend Karol had tipped me off to the fact that it was out on the shelves. “Nice shout-out in the Vogue story,” she’d written me.
My heart was pounding as I opened the magazine, turned the glossy pages, and finally located the story, one of the last in the perfume-smelling issue. I read all about the food writer’s own trials with baking the recipe devised by Lahey. Steingarten came up with a few modifications to the no-knead bread recipe that Lahey had originally published in The New York Times. Then I came to the first mention of the Brooklyn Kitchen’s contest, stating simply that it had taken place. A few paragraphs down was another mention, and finally, in the author’s notes, was this one: