Making Bread and learning about Life

I just put 2 loaves of Pane di Altamura into the oven. I’m working with the Carol Field recipe from the revised edition of The Italian Baker. I started the biga yesterday afternoon and it tripled in size by bedtime. This morning it had deflated but I read that it’s ok if that happens. So, I started mixing the dough and it was really sticky. I mean really. But I persevered assuring myself that after 10 minutes something would happen and that it would become smooth, elastic, and slightly moist which it did eventually. Then a 3 hour rise and then shaping and the second rise.

Now, I’m dense sometimes when I read a recipe and Carol Field says that there are 2 ways to shape for the final shaping and one was simpler than the other. I don’t know how many times I’ve read through the recipe but I couldn’t break up the 2 processes as she wrote them. What I ended up doing was the simpler shaping instead of the folding and shaping. Second rise was an hour and she writes that the loaves should double in size and there should be obvious big air bubbles. They did double in size but no visible bubbles. I slashed them again and put them on the peel and slid them in as the recipe instructed with the cast iron pan under the rack with the baking stone. Right before shutting the oven door I threw a  half cup of ice cubes in the pan. We’ll see. Kitchen smells good but the rest remains to be seen. Sometimes you just have to let it go and see what happens. It’s all about experience.

I like making bread, neophyte that I am. I don’t have a Kitchen Aid so it’s all done by hand. You have to ride a tricycle before the English racer, I think. I do a lot of research before I make bread b/c I’m in strict agreement that anything that could go wrong will go wrong. Is that how the saying goes?

But it’s a lot of work this learning process and you always hope that things will turn out right the first time. It’s that way in life, too. Isn’t it?

I just peeked in the oven and they have risen, golden and quite beautiful if I may so so. We’ll see.

Last week while MB and I were on S.9th St. in Phila. we bought some shrimp and Roma tomatoes..among other things. We were headed out to Nottingham to spend the night with my cousin and we thought pasta with a fresh tom sauce and shrimp would be a nice dinner. We settled on the patio in the back of her darling farmhouse and we enjoyed her delicious hummus and assorted crudites. We decided not to go out for dinner and instead cooked the shrimp and splashed them with lemon juice and added them to our feast.  We spent the rest of the evening enjoying the fragrance of the gorgeous spring night with Venus in the distance.

Back in DC the tomatoes sat until I roasted them yesterday. The house was filled with that slightly sweet tomato-y smell all day but we weren’t especially pleased that it heated up the kitchen so much. So, tonight I will saute some shrimp in garlic and a good splash of vino bianco and when they are almost finished I’ll throw in the roasted toms, a few calamata olives and a tumble of fresh herbs. We have an abundance growing just outside the kitchen door. I think I’ll choose, parsley, basil and oregano.

Since we’re definitely moving into summer temps here I think it’s time to put the polenta away and look for something else. I like cous cous very much and I also like quinoa, too. But then I thought the perfect side would be cannellini beans.  I better get moving on the beans subito! Buon Apettito!

Food historian Waverly Root describes Florentine cooking as “spare home cooking, hearty and healthy, subtle in its deliberate eschewing of sophistication, which is perhaps the highest sophistication of all.” To go one better, a friend of mine described it as a paradox of apparent simplicity of ingredients and techniques yet mysterious elusive subtleties. Whatever it is, in my heart, my Tuscan heart, it is the food I love to prepare and even more, enjoy. Andiamo cucinare e Buon Appetitio!