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Eggs on Toast I

Breakfast favourite at our house

I’ll be brief. Eggs. Toast. Salt. Pepper. Breakfast.

And a little background… Empires have been torn apart over the appropriate way to boil an egg. Do you put the egg in cold water and bring it to the boil? Or drop it into boiling water? 3 minutes? 7 minutes? Both techniques have pros and cons (cold water won’t break open a cold egg and have it spill everywhere; water that is already boiling doesn’t have to be watched so carefully to see when it’s actually boiling before you start the clock.

Wait. Maybe I’m not making sense.

Two egg cooking techniques exist:

  • One is where you put an egg into a pot of cold or lukewarm water. You turn on the heat and once the water starts boiling, you set your timer for 3 minutes. This is how my father and my sister boil an egg.
  • The other is where you boil the water and then drop in the egg for 7 minutes, while the pot simmers away. This is my wife’s technique.

I use my wife’s technique, because I see her in the morning more often than I see my dad or my sister.

But the rest of the recipe is easy. Good piece of toast – hot out of the toaster (unless you’re my dad who likes his toast cold) bit of butter… Peel the egg, chop it roughly, sea salt and pepper. Enjoy.

Breakfast of champions because it’s almost as quick as a bowl of cereal and it’s different than cereal. Variety being the spice of life and all that…

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Pizza Dough

I finally managed to make a decent dough for my pizza. Took a few tries to get it right. A friend of mine told me to write this down. Few thoughts:

The recipe often leaves things out. I remember chatting with a friend not that long ago and she commented that the biggest problem that chefs have with cookbooks is trying to make their recipes work for the home cook. It’s easy to do a pizza dough if you’re making 100 pies. Lot harder if you’re making 2 and trying to describe a process that you do every single day by memory into a few lines that the home cook can pick up and understand.

But here’s the trick: You have to proof the yeast. The dough I was making is an overnight in the fridge slow-rise dough and I had trouble getting a good rise ever since I started using this recipe. Sometimes it worked better than others, but generally it was pretty unimpressive. The recipe called for traditional yeast but neglected to remind you to let the yeast proof before you mix the whole works together.

What is proofing? Well, you need to make it active in water before you continue the recipe. Often it takes quite some time. Like 10 minutes or so. As in, mix water, sugar, yeast, oil together and then let it sit until you see activity. In my case it looked like someone was stirring the water, but the water was still.

At that point I mixed everything together and hey-presto, it worked like a charm. It rose overnight in the fridge and it rolled out and make a superior pie.

It was lucky, but it was also the product of making the dough at least a dozen times – including a particularly disastrous situation with the in-laws where the dough didn’t rise at all. Still tasted pretty good, and I wasn’t asking for the youngest daughter’s hand in marriage (thankfully that happened more than two decades previously) but still it was a bit embarrassing. Won’t let that happen again.

Soon.

Unless I’m rushing things.

Which I almost always do in the kitchen.

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Homemade bread as a marker of social status – discuss.

In the Saturday Globe and Mail, Mark Kingwell wrote an article about how the bread making craze is a way for snobbery to manifest itself. I’m not entirely sure I’m getting this right. I have read the article many times but it’s a bit above me. And I have a degree in Art History. And I read all the time.

Basically, Kingwell sees the creation of all these sourdough loafs that are immortalized on social media as a manifestation of the snob class.

He says:

To be clear, I”m not really interested in the bread part of this equation. I have eaten bread from bakeries large and small, and also baked bread myself sometimes and eaten that. Bread is a great human achievement, sure. But like every aspect of everyday life it is also a pwn in a larger chess game of status.

Ok.

I guess.

He also says:

Well, go ahead and bake bread. But your homemade toast is a boast, and the food posts are a judgement, a declaration of authenticity. Also – here’s the kicker – so is the act of claiming that they aren’t. In fact, that last move is the ultimate attempt to leapfrog into meta-boasting and meta-judging.

Uh. What is meta-boasting? You know you’re in trouble with words like that when Duck Duck Go returns travel in Meta, Italy as the first response to that search query. And you’re in even deeper trouble if this article itself is the first non-Italian option as to what meta-boasting is.

I struggle with academic articles like this because I’m not entirely sure I’m being told off, but I do get the distinct impression that by sharing my bread photos I’m one of those nauseating, smug, baker-people. Judgemental and snobbish.

Here’s my take. I like bread. A lot. I think the whole notion of baking bread is brilliant, and I want to share. I especially want to share my successes, but I’m happy to share my failures, too. (although those last couple of loafs of sandwich bread will never see the light of day as long as I’m alive. God, those were awful.)

I get frustrated when I’m told that when I’m saying, “Hey, this worked!! Who knew?” I’m actually virtue signalling in some way. Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but I just don’t think so.

If I am, I apologize. And I plead by case by offering my usual defence: Cluelessness. I apologize if I’m being obnoxious, but I need someone to be a little more specific than this to guide me to being a better person. (Oh, the irony).

I comfort myself by knowing that when I tried to make a sourdough starter it was a dismal failure. The bread I bake is currently with yeast only. So, technically, given that Kingwell was talking about sourdough bread, I’m free to do as I please.

I’ll try sourdough again in a little while. When this all blows over.

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Sandwich

Lunch at the lake

I do love this photo. The sandwich was pretty good, as well. Question: Does a piece of food taste better because of where you eat it (in this case my in-law’s property on Christina Lake in British Columbia) or taste better because of what you eat it off of? (In this case, a vintage plate that was made, as my mother would say, “When God was a little boy.”)

Difficult to say. I know the crossword added to the enjoyment, as did the fact that I could eat it while wearing a damp pair of swimming trunks.

How do non-food factors influence how we enjoy (or not enjoy) the food we eat? Would this sandwich taste the same if it were eaten in a rush in the front seat of a car in a January rainstorm?

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Bread, part one of probably a zillion

I have Jim Lahey’s book, My Bread as well as Apollonia Poilâne’s book, Poilâne. They are filled with all manner of recipes on how to make bread. Lahey has a bakery in New York; Poilane ships bread all over the planet from France, where they produce it.

My mother made bread every week for years. 8 loaves a week. It was a mixed white/whole wheat loaf, with lots of kneading and a very specific ‘route march’ as she would say. I grew up on it. It was great. But I’m not sure I can ask her for direction on making bread. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I just need to figure it out for myself. Perhaps I know better. I don’t know.

My grandmother was never good at bread. It’s a strange thing to say, given that I would have happily taken a bullet for her. She survived so much – Her name was Frances May Chambers. When she was born, her father was in France, and he was supposed to be home for May. Enough said. The story was that she couldn’t make bread well because she could make great pastry, and the techniques for good pastry (gentle, calm) didn’t translate well into bread (knead, aggressive).

I like to think I’m more like my grandmother than my mother when it comes to baking, and the reason why I struggle with bread is because I excel at pastry. Which is true, except for that last part. My pastry needs work, too. Lots of work.

My pizza dough sometimes works; other times it doesn’t. I use Beddia’s recipe from his book, Pizza Camp. It’s an overnight dough you raise in the fridge. And it’s always at least OK, but it’s rarely great. I have to take it out to rise on the counter for several hours, and I tend to use more yeast than what is called for. When it works, it’s great. But often it’s just… OK. My no-knead bread is coming along, but sourdough starter was a total failure and my most recent sandwich loaf was greeted with the reminder that I have other strengths.

A loaf that actually worked out all right.

Maybe I should talk to mom about bread. Couldn’t hurt.

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