Le Pain qu’on ne pétrit pas

Complete fiascoes are few and far between in my kitchen. I’m not sure whom to thank for this — my lucky star, my karma, my mom? — but the fact is that the things I cook or bake very rarely end up in the trash. I have disappointments of course, dishes that turn out a bit meh despite my high hopes, but nothing quite as débâcle-like as when I tried my hand at the recipe everyone has been raving about lately, stressing how laughably easy and forgiving it is: Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread.

As laughably easy and forgiving as it may be, it did take me three trials and three days to get it to work. What went wrong, you ask?

Problem number one: the consistency of the dough. The New York Times recipe gave the amount of flour in cups: this introduces a considerable bias depending on how one measures (spooning vs. scooping), a bias that is further multiplied by the fact that the recipe calls for three cups of flour. I used the generally accepted volume-to-weight conversion for flour (one cup = 120 grams), and this produced a dough that was so soupy — more like a batter, really — I found it impossible to work with as instructed. This problem was solved by turning to C&Z readers and then bread experts, who had kindly calculated the right weight of flour based on the target hydration of the dough.

Problem number two, my stupid fault entirely. I own a sugar thermometer, an oven thermometer, and a medical thermometer, but I don’t own a thermometer that will measure the temperature of a room and I have no notion whatsoever of how warm my apartment is. So when the recipe said, “warm room temperature, about 70°F,” I decided that it meant, “on top of the radiator.” The unfortunate consequence of this — and it took me two failed attempts but just one question to Maxence to realize my blunder — was that the dough overproofed like mad. By the time I was supposed to fold it and gather it into a ball (try shaping soup into a ball, it’s fun), its peak state of proofing was a distant memory: it played dead during the second rise, and baked into a gummy pancake so sorry-looking that even Parisian pigeons would have turned their beak up, and those guys will eat anything.

Embitter or discourage me these failures did not. Judging by the number of happy customers it had garnered, the recipe had to have something going for it, and by Toutatis I was determined to catch the magic by its fluttering wings and slam it down on my kitchen counter. So on day three I prepared a new loaf, and this one turned out to be so astonishingly successful it was worth every single minute and every single gram of flour sacrificed in the process.

My third loaf was baked late on Sunday evening in my chick yellow Coquelle, and this gave it a nice shape not unlike that of the Scrameustache’s space shuttle.

Our neighbors happened to drop by for a drink and a chat just as I was taking it out of the oven (I suspect they just followed the smell from the landing); we murmured words of support to one another during the forty-five excruciating minutes it took for the bread to cool down properly. And when the time had finally come for me to slice it and we each tried a few bites (with and without demi-sel butter), I just about fainted from the combination of joy, pride, and sensory bliss.

A golden crust of ideal thickness and consistency, offering just the right amount of crisp ridges and chewy valleys, a crumb so supple and fleshy it almost felt alive, and a subtle complexity of scent and flavor that wasn’t so assertive as to overwhelm what you’d serve the bread with — this was a loaf I would be more than willing to pay good money for at the boulangerie. By the following morning it had developed the faintest hint of a hazelnut smell — this went remarkably well with a good spread of macadamia butter — and it kept very well for the two days it took us to munch our way through it.

I haven’t yet had time to start a fourth loaf, but I plan to sometime over the weekend. I feel reasonably confident about it (whichever way you look at it, there is no way my one successful loaf in three could have been beginner’s luck), and I am curious to try using a bit of chestnut flour this time and to follow Sam Fromartz’s advice to set 1/4 cup of the dough aside, let it develop in the fridge for two days, and use it for extra flavor in the next loaf.

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One should always be careful what one writes about on one’s blog, for one never knows what hungry demons one might unleash as one mulls over edible memories from one’s past.

After I wrote about shortbread last week and listed some of the things we liked to buy at Marks & Spencer’s, I could not get their stem ginger biscuits out of my mind. These cookies were tough little things to bite into, but they crumbled in your mouth and ignited such a delicious blaze of ginger flavor that they were plenty worth having a dental brace or two come loose in the process.

Unable to find a copycat recipe or even a list of ingredients to replicate the original, I just improvised on the theme and, putting an extraordinary amount of faith in my baking instincts, assembled a cookie dough using both fresh and crystallized ginger for flavor, unrefined cane sugar and cane syrup for sweetness, and rolled spelt for a nicely raggedy texture.

To say that I was pleased with the results of my tinkering would be a bit of an understatement, and this was all in all a very good thing since I accidently produced three dozen cookies — much more than I usually make at once. Lightly chewy in the center and crisp around the edges when fresh out of the oven, they crisped up further, just as I’d hoped they would, in the tin box I left them in.

This makes them ideal companions to a cup of tea (dunk dunk), and they were quite well received when I served them with a pear compote at the end our very fall-oriented dinner party the next evening, after a main course of roasted duckling (baked à la Poulet de Muriel, but with an orange instead of a lemon), glazed carrots, and brise de châtaigne.

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[Bread Baking Class]

Hi, my name is Clotilde, and I have conquered my fear of yeast.

For years and years, everytime a recipe called for yeast — dry, instant, fresh, whatever — I would write it off with a resigned sigh, like the plain teenaged girl writes off the popular unkempt boy, thinking, “He’s not for me.”

I didn’t know the moves, I didn’t know where to begin, I didn’t know how things worked, I didn’t know what the dough should look and feel like, and it all felt very mysterious and very intimidating. I had bought a blindingly handsome stand mixer to encourage myself, and while the leaf and whisk attachments were frequently taken for a spin, the dough hook remained in the cabinet, sulking what it thought to be a guilt-inducing sulk, and rightly so.

But then one morning I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and said to myself, “You’re twenty-seven now. Shouldn’t you take the bull by the horns and just take a friggin’ bread-baking class?” And with that, I went online and booked myself one.

The class was held on a Saturday afternoon at the back of a bakery in the 20th called Le 140, whose baguette once won the much-coveted Meilleure Baguette de Paris prize. Our teacher was Jean-Michel, a friendly and energetic boulanger who made the class as fun as it was instructive.

When we arrived, everything had been pre-measured* for the frasage, the step that consists in pouring water into the bowl of flour, salt, and yeast, and then blending everything together with your hand until the dough stops sticking to the sides of the bowl and your hand looks like it’s wearing a cement glove.

[Notes and tips: Use only one of your hands for the frasage so you can still use the other one to hold the bowl, and rub your nose when it unavoidably itches. We used the yeast directly, without diluting it first as some recipes instruct you to. The salt and yeast were placed on the flour well apart from one another so they wouldn’t touch, otherwise the power of the yeast would be lessened.]

We turned the dough out on the lightly floured work surface and started kneading, pushing a small part of the dough firmly away from us with one hand and pulling it all the way back over the dough, before giving the dough an eighth of a turn and repeating this step. We kneaded and kneaded until the dough was smooth and slightly warm and we couldn’t feel our shoulders anymore .

We then divided the dough into four pieces, which allowed us to make all sorts of clever jokes about the biblical arithmetics of bread. Each piece was shaped according to the type of loaf it was destined to be. One of them was stuffed with diced comté cheese and chopped walnuts, and for this we folded the dough over the ingredients once and over itself multiple times, so the ingredients would be distributed evenly. All the pieces were covered with cloth for the first rise, a.k.a. le pointage, which lasted 30 minutes.

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I grew up in the most anglophile French household I know, where the paperbacks strewn about the coffee table often bore little penguins, where the parents used English as a secret language when they didn’t want their daughters to understand, and where sending them to England every summer sounded like a good idea (that question is still up for debate; in any case, there went the secret language).

Food-wise, it meant that fried eggs frequently came with Worcestershire sauce and bacon (and even bangers if we were lucky), that fromage blanc was liberally doused with Golden Syrup, and that Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without my mother’s marzipan-topped Christmas cake, prepared and left to ripen weeks in advance.

It also meant that shopping expeditions to the Boulevard Haussmann department stores always ended with a quick run through Marks & Sparks‘ food section for tea, English muffins, stem ginger biscuits, hot cross buns, mincemeat pies, cole slaw, ready-made Indian dishes, and even bangers if we were lucky. Oh, and shortbread, too, which disappeared at a speed proportional to their butter content.

By the time Marks & Spencer decided to stab us in the heart and close their French stores (over some futile reason like not making any profit) it had become fairly easy to find British goods of all kinds in even the most ordinary of grocery stores in Paris. But when it comes to shortbread, I’d discovered that baking your own was even easier — and much more gratifying, too, in that call-me-Delia sort of way.

The following recipe uses stone-ground cornmeal to produce the supernal crunchy note any self-respecting shortbread should present. It results in an obviously buttery* but not overly sweet shortbread that you may choose to grace with a hint of vanilla or citrus zest. There is no law against piling on the chocolate chips and dried fruits and nuts and bells and whistles, but I am of the mind that simple is best.

* Do use the very best butter you can find; if there is one recipe that will showcase it in all its glory, this is it.

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