Last Fall the local French bakery, run by a young French
couple, closed shop and, with it, their stand at the farmer’s market where I
bought my bread, and moved onto the more appreciative climes of LA. That left
what I consider to be the only worthy bread baker, but his business model doesn’t
suit me: you have to remember, on Friday morning, to go online by 7:00 and wait
for him to post the bread offerings for ordering and then pick-up the next day—at
another prescribed time, 11:00 a.m.—at a different, less convenient local
farmer’s market. If you are a little late, what you want may be sold out. Then of
course you might forget to pick it up, if you, like me, get up early and are
already well into your day by 11. Pity those who like to sleep late, too! They
would have to set their alarm to order bread.
So while I have done this a few times, and it may all seem
so quaint and local at first blush, I quickly tired of it. There was a tendency
to feel like you had to order bread while you could, resulting in your buying
too much—or settling for a bread you don’t really want if others were already
taken. And of course, even when you set your phone alarm, missing either the
ordering or the pickup for one reason or another. To say nothing of the somewhat
soup-Nazi quality of the baker, complete with long—yup—bread lines for pickup. Not
for me.
I absolutely adore bread, carbohydrates be damned, and from
time to time over the course of the last 40 years or so, have made my own bread
on a regular or semi-regular basis. Bread books take up a full shelf in my very
large cookbook collection, and I can’t resist a new one (or a new old one if I
come across something forgotten but interesting), and recently added the
Forkish
book after reading a lot of praise. I have several artisan books, so there’s
not a lot new here, more of a synthesis, and I don’t know if it will become a
favorite—won’t know ‘til I try the levains. But trying the first simple bread
gave me a story to tell, so here it is.
Finding myself with a free day—amazingly, having finished
project grading early—I thought, why not stay
home and bake bread? The whole
thing is so simple that I had a lovely, relaxing day, reading and puttering
between stages. I used a local Arizona heritage grain flour from
Hayden Mills, mixed with a little first clear flour and dark rye, and adjusted the hydration to 80%. This was going to be good!
When the dough was perfectly proofed, I was just about to put
it in the oven when: the electricity went out. Which means, of course, my oven
did too.
I waited a few minutes—maybe this was just a blip?—but no. I
looked out—everything, the entire city, was in the dark; we had been having a
wild storm all day, the first rain in months. I put the proofed dough in the
refrigerator. The oven went cold. Forty-five minutes later, the electricity
came on, and I pre-heated the oven again.
By the time it was ready, my dough had spent about over an hour in the
fridge, and it had suffered by becoming a little overproofed despite the cold.
I knew what that meant.
aving
They say every cloud has a sliver lining. Here is a golden
one, complete with rainbow, snapped from my patio while waiting for the lights to come back
on. And here is the bread. Worth another try.
