I’ve said before how much I love it when my parents come out for a visit. This weekend was another wonderful example of why. New York is beautiful in the Fall, I must admit. The brisk weather, sweaters and scarves, the rich colors are irresistible. The weather cooperated with us for the most part, and I even took Monday off to extend the weekend. It was perfect weekend to spend with my family!
Ben's fresh baked Portuguese Sweet Bread
There are many things about Ben that I am proud of. One of them is his ability and passion for making bread. He makes it from scratch in our kitchen and it always comes out smelling and tasting delicious. (We usually have to sit on our hands to keep from cutting into it before it has cooled enough.) The other night he was making a baguette and I asked him what baking bread means to him. He stopped fidgeting with the stand mixer and thought. Bread has been the foundational food of civilizations for ages, he finally said. Even today you would be hard pressed to find a culture in the world that does not have bread in some form. True, I thought. He went on, there is something very elemental about baking bread. It really brings you into this larger context of culture, it connects you to civilizations that are long since vanished. Yes, I thought, trying to imagine an ancient baker hovering over his stone oven next to a tent made of sheep skin somewhere in the Cradle of Civilization. There is something in the process of making bread that connects us to antiquity.
As I mused, Ben added some water to the dough whirring around in the stand mixer and continued. You start feeling like you are experiencing the progression of civilization over the centuries just in the time it takes you to make a loaf of bread. (And it does take time, usually about 2 days start to finish.) Each step, creating the preferment, mixing the ingredients to create the dough, giving it time to rise, punching it down, rising again, then kneading it, scoring it and finally baking it, is a footprint along the path of someone else’s discovery. You walk that well-trodden path after centuries of others have perfected the process, which they relied upon for their survival. Bread is in large and small ways a representation of time. He dropped in a pinch of salt and set the dough in a bowl to rise. I realized then that this was what sustained humanity for hundreds of generations in far reaching places. This was the essential food, grandiose and symbolic, simple and yet so complex, and they made it with their own hands from the elemental earth. The staff of life from scratch.
As I watched Ben move around the kitchen, it came to me that he is the type that, when he’s interested in something, isn’t content with just learning a little. He wants to know how it works from the ground up. When it came to bread, it started when he was in college. I recalled walking into his dorm room and being nearly knocked over by what smelled like molding socks. Given that these were college boys in a dormitory it very well could have been molding socks. In this case, however, it wasn’t. It was a sour dough starter. Now, you can buy active dry yeast in the grocery store, but Ben wanted to be able to make his own yeast – from scratch. I smiled remembering the bread that followed, if you could call it that since it was more like a large brick. But it was a first attempt and after more research, he made some adjustments and tried again. (That’s what you have to do with bread. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try again. Perseverance is key. This has always been one of Ben’s strengths.)
The stand mixer finally stopped whirring and the change brought me out of my reverie and back into my kitchen. Ben was leaning over the mixer’s bowl, gently coaxing the dough off the dough hook. Continuing his answer to my original question, he said: Measuring out ingredients to exact proportions is not enough to make great bread. The dough stuck to his fingers as he pulled it away from the mixer. It’s not just about timing or ingredients, he added. There are so many other factors: the type of flour, where the grain was grown, even today’s weather. You have to rely on the feel. It’s intuition. You have to know just how tacky the dough should be for the type of bread you want. He held up the dough ball to show me that it was slightly tacky, but not spongy. If it’s too dry, the bread will be dense and hard. On the other hand, too much water weight makes the air bubbles inside collapse while it’s baking and then it comes out flat. There’s really no foolproof water-to-flour ratio to use every time. It’s very tactile. So, you’ve just gotta know the feel, he concluded. Then he turned to start cleaning up. I watched him scrape the dough scraps off the counter into his hands. He threw them away and rubbed his hands together. There was still flour on them. It sounded different than clean hands. He wiped them on his dark jeans, leaving white streaks. I looked down and rubbed my fingers together to feel the powdery smoothness as if it were on my hands too. Carefully, Ben set the dough aside in a bowl to proof.
A while later, I watched as Ben shaped the dough into a boule and scored it with a knife, then put it in the oven. One hour and a steamy loaf would be permeating the kitchen with its rich, earthy aroma. It would still be some time before we could cut into it, about 45 minutes. The baking process continues even after the bread is cooling on the rack. Cut it too soon and you’ll bring that process to a screeching stop and the inside will lose the light fluffiness you’ve worked so many days for. So as difficult as it was, we sat on our hands and waited until it was ready. Once again, the bread reminded us that things at their best take time. But, as usual, it was so worth the wait.
Saturday night we went over to our friends Brigitte and Kevin’s house for dinner. Our menu consisted entirely of middle eastern fare and involved some cooking techniques that certain cultures have been using for a thousand years. It was an interesting experience in food history. But looking back, I realize that it was also a celebration of friends history, which always pairs well with a great meal and good wine.
I have known Brigitte since my sophomore year in college. I can remember my first impressions of her as we introduced ourselves as new roommates. I distinctly recall noticing her laugh, easy and contagious. The more I got to know her the more I discovered her tendencies toward chaos rather than order and the unconventional rather than the socially acceptable. They showed themselves in her messy dorm room and in essays she wrote for her Creative Writing class. But there was always an artful, whimsical curiosity when these things manifested themselves. She seemed to always be exploring the world. And instead of clashing with my more reserved, cautious nature, her friendship complemented and broadened me. I think we have rubbed off on each other some in the years we’ve changed into adults. She has helped me become more open minded and laugh more easily at myself and at the world. I think maybe I have helped her be more purposeful, or at least see the value in a tidy house.
For dinner, Ben and I brought over a few ingredients but Brigitte and Kevin did most of the cooking. Our table was set with tabbouleh, couscous and laban, which is essentially a thick sweet yogurt, a staple in Lebanese cooking. There was also falafel, which I first had in Amsterdam, Holland while I was there with my youth group in 2000. We stuffed pita bread with the laban, which holds everything together (like the sour cream in a taco), tabbouleh and falafel, then dipped it in the couscous. Delicious! To top it off, Brigitte made Turkish Coffee, a process which I, a devout coffee lover, found fascinating. It tasted much more bitter than regular coffee, but with a little sugar it took on a rich depth that went perfectly with dessert. The cake was Semolian…get this…Sfoof cake. Sfoof. You know you want to say it again. Sfoof cake can be sweet or less so depending on how much sugar you add. It’s bright yellow due to the turmeric and the texture is something like cornbread. A lovely ending to a lovely meal.
We have always enjoyed cooking together, Brigitte and I, especially for our friends. We’re both Italian, so it comes naturally. Saturday night’s dinner seemed to me like pulling some old portion of our college life out of the shadowy cupboard and into the present to be enjoyed. To celebrate not just how things used to be, but the familiar comfort that they have always been this way.
We all know baking is an essential part of the holidays. There’s chocolate cookies, sugar cookies, red and green sprinkles, truffles and the infamous fruitcake, all of which is usually followed by a nation-wide increase in gym memberships. Inkeeping with this tradtion, last night I tried to make my grandmother’s famous meringue coconut Christmas cookies. I can remember these being my absolute favorite cookies ever since I was old enough for solid food. Sadly, my Nana passed about 13 years ago, and no one could bake these quite like she could. That is a long time between cookies. I know she was probably smiling down at me from Heaven last night as I gazed into the oven watching these little puffy white clouds bake to perfection. I was thinking of her the whole time, especially when I finally pulled one off the hot baking sheet and that familiar aroma made me five years old again. Nana and I often struggled because she was a tough nana and I could be an equally tough kid. I have a lot of memories of her that sometimes hurt to think about. But I know that she loved me. I could tell beause no matter what, she’d always let me have just one more coconut meringue cookie.