Fromartz baguette clinic gets a little Ink in DC

So, I spend a week in Paris and suddenly I'm an expert on la baguette? Well, truth be told I've been trying to make these little long loaves for about a decade and thanks to soon-to-be-launched Afar magazine, I got the chance to take my technique to a new level by working at boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel in the 9th in Paris.

Then my friend Tim Carmen, a food writer here in D.C., was intrigued so we held a clinic. He did a good job at making the loaves as he recounts in this blog posting at Young & Hungry and in the pictures he posted.

OK, now I know I've talked about posting more bread recipes on ChewsWise, but breadmaking is less about a "recipe" than it is about technique. And technique is the toughest thing to describe, though I'll give a hint: Time is the most important ingredient. The dough we worked with was rising 36 hours old by the time we shaped the loaves. But I promise I'll give more details as soon as I can.
- Samuel Fromartz

Only in Los Angeles - Korean Mexican Taco Trucks

I recently came across KCRW's good food blog, associated with one of my favorite food radio shows. They've posted a video on Los Angeles taco trucks that proves that some of the most exciting cuisine happens at the fringe, as in the Korean Mexican taco truck. 

Alice Waters Launches Frozen Food!

Alice Waters launches a frozen food line, which her office described as “a crossover product making sustainability accessible to a wider audience," Civil Eats reports.

The “Simple Perfection”entrees, which consist of a oven-ready terra-cotta plate rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with salt are designed to be laden with seasonal vegetables by the user.

Rock on Alice! Oh, wait, that was yesterday's news...

Organic Demand Falling?

In the UK, the Telegraph reports that demand for organic food is falling by nearly a third, from a year ago, as consumers economize. Are they right?

Several supermarkets have confirmed a decline in organic sales during the economic slowdown but the Soil Association, the country's leading organic organisation, says this is because of the growth of independent stores selling boxes of locally-sourced organic produce for home delivery.

In other words, the Soil Association is seeing a boom in local -- underscored by the enormous growth in farmers markets and CSAs in the U.K. 

I haven't seen any recent comparable figures for the U.S., though a headline in the newsletter from the Northeast Organic Dairy Farmers Alliance read: "Organic pay price declines as processors panic over spring flush of milk and declining growth in sales." The article quotes figures saying that demand for organic milk grew 24% in 2008 but is projected to grow in the single-digits in 2009. Prices farmers get for organic milk have already fallen. The spring flush, by the way, is the time of year when cows produce a lot of milk.

If any market research types want to chime in with the latest data, I'd be interested to see if the U.S. is seeing anything like the reported fall in the U.K.

- Samuel Fromartz

A White House Garden It's Not, But...

The Slow Cook has a post on a guy in Portland, Oregon, who got tired of waiting for a plot at a community garden, so he used Google maps to locate nearby empty city lots. Then he contacted owners about gardening on the vacant properties. One woman replied:

The landowner had recently received a nuisance complaint from the cityabout the buildup of refuse on the lot. She was elated that I would clean up the lot and turn it into a garden. In exchange for the use of the land, I am providing her with approximately one CSA share of produce for 16 weeks. We drew up an agreement, and she promises to give me as much advance notice as possible should she decide to sell. She also offered me a lot four times the size of this one, about 20 blocks away, which I hope to use next year.

The risk, of course, is that in a few years he'll lose the land and all the work he put into it, but then I imagine there will be other plots for the taking.

Let every empty city lot be a garden! Imagine.

More on the garden here.

White House Garden Starting Late?

I got my spinach and peas in last week and the Obamas are only now digging up their lawn? Actually, it's just the right time in Washington, D.C., to begin gardening.

If you look at the plan, the garden is friggin' huge for one family. They'll have a ton of lettuce and spinach in about 8 weeks, depending on their seedlings (which I assume they are using). I bet tomatoes will follow the greens.

Here's the garden plan if you didn't see it in the Times. And who is advising them? Good question...

White House Garden Almost Jeffersonian, if Not for Sheep

Looks like the White House veggie garden is a go, confirming all the talk so far. Look forward to the official announcement. There's a long history to this -- Jefferson had a garden at the White House and grazed sheep on the front lawn in 1807.

According to the Jefferson Encyclopedia:

From James D. Barry he receivedthe animal that leaps most vividly from the letters and diaries of the time: a four-horned Shetland ram who for five years provoked his owner to both eulogy and malediction. Four days after receiving this "round and beautiful animal," Jefferson wrote to his ten-year-old granddaughter: "I am now possessed of individuals of four of the most remarkable varieties of the race of the sheep. . . . I mean to pay great attention to them, pro bono publico." He commissioned his Irish coachman to begin purchasing ewes and the Shetland ram was immediately put to the task of reproducing his own kind.

By the spring there were almost forty presidential sheep grazing on the square in front of the White House. If it had been the year 2000, there would also have been a flock of lawsuits. Several unsuspecting pedestrians tried to take a short cut across the square, met the Shetland ram, and were vanquished in their encounter. One William Keough wrote Jefferson that "in Passing through the President's Square [I] was attacked and severely wounded and bruised by your excellency's ram-of which [I] lay ill for five or six weeks." Another of the ram's unfortunate victims, as we learn from the diary of Jefferson's friend Anna Maria Thornton, was "a fine little boy killed by the Ram that the president has."

Obviously, that type of animal husbandry would best be avoided now, though a ram might do wonders for dealing with AIG.

For the Home Baker, Time is a Friend

Norwich Sourdough

In the age of speed and instant gratification, time is an enemy. We want things now. We don't want to wait. We want results. And so, for time-pressed bakers, we have products like yeast that can speed things up.

But if you are concerned about things like the flavor of bread, the texture of the crumb, and the crunchiness of the crust, and even its color, speed is an enemy. Rushing will mean an inferior result. So many of the techniques artisan bakers use, either with sourdough, which takes successive "feedings" to grow into a loaf, or refrigeration, which dramatically slows down the activity of yeast, are meant to stretch out time so that all the crucial characteristics of a great loaf can develop.

I brought all those processes to bear in the "Norwich Sourdough" batard pictured above, with a recipe courtesy of Wild Yeast, a wonderful bread blog I've recently been following. (I especially like her yeast spotting pictures of breads around the Web). It's based on a recipe from Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes.

For someone always in a rush, slowing down the baking process can be irksome. But for a home baker, the slow development of dough actually works in your favor.

How so?

Because it means you can fit baking into your own schedule, mixing the dough after dinner, putting it in the refrigerator, and then baking off the next day, when you have time.

For example, for the batard pictured above, I refreshed the sourdough late Thursday night. Then I mixed the dough with the bubbly starter early Friday morning. While I was working, the dough went through a 2-1/2 hour first rise, and then I shaped the loaves around lunch time on Friday, when I had another window of time. Since I couldn't bake in the afternoon, I put the loaves into the refrigerator to slow down (or retard) the dough.

They rested there, for about 8 hours, the sourdough doing its mojo - the flavor, crust, internal holes all developing - until late Friday night when I baked them off. (I was a bit skeptical they could be baked straight out of the refrig, as Susan at Wild Yeast suggested, but they turned out just fine -- oven spring, crunchy crust, with a hint of rye.)

I often time this process to bake on Saturday morning, but I had a compost meeting at the garden (no joke!) so I decided to bake Friday night instead. And since the loaves were made purely with sourdough, they tend to improve with a bit of aging and were scrumptious for breakfast the next day. Sourdough loaves will also last a week without going stale -- one of the qualities of working with natural yeast.

"Norwich Sourdough" is an advanced recipe, so I wouldn't steer a beginner to it. But even if you start with a recipe like Jim Lahey's fantastically popular and easy no-knead bread (which makes a decent enough loaf) you can follow my point. Mix the dough at night, then bake it off the next day, when you have time, since the no-knead dough can rise from 12-20 hours. (I'll probably write more about no-knead dough in the future, but if you do follow Mark Bittman's recipe in the Times, add 1/4-1/2 tsp more salt than he recommends. If you're starting out baking, the video is also worth a look.)

In Lahey's recipe, you don't knead. The long rise of the dough develops the gluten necessary to make the loaf. So if you're trying to fit baking into a busy schedule, time is on your side. The slow rise always wins the race.

- Samuel Fromartz

 

Department of Good Reads - Sandra Tsing Loh's Class Warfare

Instead of linking to news items for the sake of stuffing your mind with more and MORE information, I'm going to start occasional links to what I think are particularly good reads (whatever the subject). After all, I know cooks and farmers who are aspiring writers ... and many writers who are aspiring farmers and cooks.

Sandra Tsing Loh is neither, but what the heck. Last night I was lying in bed laughing out load about her piece "Class Dismissed" in The Atlantic. She's a performance artist who does NPR rants and has a book, Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! (interview here) that trusted sources (OK, my wife) tells me is hilarious. It's on my list. Here's the lede of her Atlantic piece:

Some 25 years have passed since the publication of Paul Fussell’s naughty treat, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,and I think this quarter-century mark merits the raising of either a yachting pennant, an American flag, or a wind sock with the Budweiser logo (corresponding to Fussell’s demarcations of Upper Class, Middle Class, and Prole). For readers who somehow missed this snide, martini-dry American classic, do have your assistant Tessa run out and get it immediately (Upper), or at least be sure to worriedly skim this magazine summary over a low-fat bagel (Middle), because Fussell’s bibelot-rich tropes still resonate... (read more)

Is Organic and Local "so 2008"?

By Lisa M. Hamilton

Organic and Local is so 2008—or at least that’s the case that journalist and “The End of Food” author Paul Roberts makes in Mother Jones this month. The gist of his argument: because the food system’s problems are so deep, the food movement needs to mature beyond its one-dimensional, at times robotic devotion to Organic and Local and instead adopt a broader range of solutions.

He offers the example of Fred Fleming, a noted Washington wheat farmer whose masterful no-till system has greatly reduced erosion from his land. Fleming remains outside the foodie circle because his system depends on using herbicide, but Roberts argues that he is just the sort of farmer we should be embracing.  Roberts does make an important point: agriculture faces many more issues than whether or not farmers use pesticides; to boot, all of those issues are currently being compounded by climate change.

Wes Jackson of the Land Institute recently made a related point underscoring the threat we face from soil erosion. He argues that the most damaging climate-change-related weather events we’re seeing are not hurricanes hitting the Eastern seaboard, but heavy rainfall and floods in the Midwest. In Jackson’s view, even the destruction wreaked by Katrina did not compare to the long-term loss we suffer from having millions of tons of farmland topsoil washed away in floods, as happened last March and April. I can imagine Roberts chiming in to say that if using some Roundup would hold that soil in place, the tradeoff would be worthwhile. It’s hard to disagree with that. 

But after hearing Roberts make his case live at Organicology in February, I would argue that he’s too near-sighted with his remedy. Rather than embrace farmers’ lesser-of-many-evils practices within the existing system, we need to overhaul the system itself. As it is, farmers are expected to be purely economic beings that fit into the free market alongside mortgage securities; the true solution instead lies in seeing them as the ecological caretakers we so desperately need them to be.

Think of it roughly like the National Parks: Years ago, we as a nation recognized the need for large areas of land to be taken out of the real estate market for the express purpose of maintaining them according to a different set of priorities; we saw that wild lands served the public good, and that not protecting them was to our detriment. Well, now we’ve reached the same situation with our working lands, as the constant pressure of the market system has led them to a threatened existence.

I’m not suggesting we buy up farmland and make it government property, but rather that we recognize farmers and ranchers as a kind of public servant. To begin with, replace the Farm Bill’s provisions for subsidies and incentives for commodity production with a true support system of financing, education, and farmer-centered research and market development; that could enable growers to switch their focus from bank notices to caring for their lands long-term. In time, probably most would gravitate to ecological methods such as the organic no-till farming system that Rodale has been developing for the past decade. 

Some, though, might choose herbicide-dependent no-till as the suture that would hold their land in place. In that lies the greatest challenge of supporting farmers: trusting that given the proper tools, they know and will do what’s best for the land. I believe that trust is where Roberts’ argument was leading, even if it didn’t quite reach that conclusion in the MoJo article. If so, it’s a step in the right direction.

Northern California-based writer/photographer Lisa M. Hamilton focuses on food and agriculture. Her book "Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness" (Counterpoint) comes out in May. 

What Is it about Baking Bread?

sourdough demi baguettes

I’ve been baking a lot of bread lately and I’ve begun to think about why. Of course, there’s the immediate aroma and taste of fresh bread. There’s the delight in giving bread to friends and neighbors. And then there is the work itself, tactile and supple and real at a time when we're battered by things we can't control - like the the financial implosion of the economy. At times like this, it's good to be close at home, working with water, flour, yeast and salt and feeding your family.

I’ve been baking now for about a decade, with periods where I baked little, or like now, when I bake rather constantly. Working at home, it’s not hard, since the “work” part of bread is rather minimal. For the breads I make, I mix up the dough in the afternoon or evening, and then let it rise slowly through the night, baking off the loaves the next day. This breaks up the work and lets me control the schedule -- which isn’t always the case when you’re working with a living thing.

I’ve also wondered how to explore this activity, whether it was right for ChewsWise or another blog, but decided, I’ll just write about it here, so I’m launching a new category, “bread,” to talk about this activity. After all, what can be more “sustainable” than making bread.

So I’ll start off with a few pictures, and in the future will be posting some recipes and thoughts about techniques for the home baker.

I also had the opportunity recently to visit Paris and to work at the elbow of a master baker at boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel (whose baguettes are in the bin on the left). I will be writing about this in a new magazine being launched this summer, Afar, but will expand on it here too before too long.

It’s funny, but recently I've been getting more and more requests from people to learn how to bake. In the past few months, I’ve got four people hooked and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. People are looking for something real and solid to sink their hands and teeth into. What is better than bread?

Sourdough pain de campagne with pumpkin, flax and sesame seeds

Pollan's New Project - Your Family's Food Rules

Michael Pollan pressed readers of the NYT Well blog to post their family tips on smart eating, pursuing his thread that traditional, ethnic or family wisdom has more to offer than scientists and nutritionists.

In one day he got more than 1,200 comments (though a tech glitch prevents most of them from appearing, for the moment). Here are a few:

• When (my grandmother) made her famous babka, you were never sure if it was a ‘cake’ or a ‘bread’ because she only used enough sugar to give you the illusion of it being sweet. TOO SWEET was never an option in her baked goods.
• Eat a little of everything; take your time; enjoy your food.
• “Don’t eat plastic food.” In other words, if it’s not a real ingredient, you don’t want it–this applies to faux sugars, chemical additives, fake colors, etc.
• My main food rule is “cook your own food from scratch.” This was as much a food rule growing up in my family as it was a budget rule.
• My grandmother always used to say: “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.” She always kept her slim figure and she never had to diet.
• Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my family got a wok and made a lot of stir fries. We learned a little bit of meat goes a long way -- a rule I live by today. Another rule I try and live by though admittedly don't always succeed in following -- at least two sides of veggies with dinner; if we're eating vegetarian that night, it means at least three (including easy ones like raw carrots or hummus).
- Samuel Fromartz