redemption

The finished product, already somewhat devoured.
Photo by Jake J. Thomas

     In order to start this project and to take it seriously as a course that I designed for myself, I realized that I needed to brush up on my baking vocabulary.  It had been a while since I had baked and I was worried that I had lost what little skill I had acquired.  I was also worried that the desire to bake might be extinguished by the time-consuming labor involved with nurturing dough into an edible art.  I was worried, that once I committed to the project, I might lose interest, and that this blog would be another half-start to a project left undone.  So I decided to do some research and bake a few odd recipes from some cookbooks I had or ones that I could easily check out from the library.

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     I picked up Martha Stewart’s Baking cookbook, to really test myself.  This cookbook holds the infamous “Palmier Cookie recipe” that almost scared me from ever baking again.  I flipped through all the pastries; perfectly coiffed cakes with unbelievably smooth frostings and found the bread section.  By this time, I was eating Nutella straight from the jar.  Most of the bread recipes required special equipment and not one was written with the realization that not everyone has a Kitchen Aid mixer, a bread peel, a stone, a special bread scraper with a French name that has slipped my mind, and expensive hard-to-find ingredients that even the local exorbitantly priced health food store didn’t carry.  Then I found the Focaccia recipe. The photograph in the book looked delicious, but not impossibly delicious like the perfectly-spackled frosted cakes in the previous chapter. I decided to give it a shot. 

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Photo by Jake J. Thomas

     The process seemed easy enough, put flour, yeast and water in the mixer, mix and let rise for 2 hours.  Then add the salt and mix with the dough hook to resemble kneading.  Turn out the dough and fold it (using that French-dough-scraper thing, or in Martha's words, to a lesser degree, your fingers)and then let it rise for another hour. Repeat the folding process, let it rise for another hour, and fill a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil.  Then stretch the dough to fit the baking sheet, flip it, pour on more olive oil and coarse salt and bake. It turned out to be somewhat successful.  The bread came shooting out of the oven and almost landed right on the floor, because the olive oil had drenched itself into every crevice of the kitchen including the bottom of the baking sheet.  Our dog Luck was standing close by in case of an emergency like that. The only difficult part was timing my other activities for the day around the rising schedule and flipping the finished bread off of the rimmed baking sheet onto a wire rack over a baking sheet, and pouring the remaining olive oil on top of the freshly baked bread.

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     Before I made the bread, I read through all of the instructions, a very important lesson I learned in a very unfortunate way on another recipe, starting with the opening statement saying that the Focaccia was best eaten the day it was baked.  I thought, “What kind of maniacs could eat all that bread in one day?” Turns out I am a maniac.  The bread was a hit, Jake and Caroline loved it and I felt a little bit like a superhero that had pulled off a difficult task.  I felt like I had made mayonnaise from scratch, like I had whipped my egg whites to a stiff peak, like I had mastered the perfect croissant.  It almost wiped the memory of those damn Palmier’s from my mind. 



The process of tucking the dough before the second rise
Photo by Jake J. Thomas



http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/best-focaccia

 

hello.

     This is me, Kaitlin Marie Fasse.  This photograph (and all the photographs in this blog) was taken by my partner Jake Thomas around the time I decided to do this project.  The project, of baking my way through the Tassajara Bread Book.

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     I never really helped my mom in the kitchen with baking or cooking, besides the occasional Christmas cookie for Santa, or cupcake for my sister’s birthday. Maybe I was intimidated by her Martha Stewart-ly ways but maybe I was just not interested at the time.  One thing I know for sure, is that I have always loved bread.  As soon as I could drive, I would stop at the grocery store before school to purchase a freshly baked loaf that I would eat all day long.  Seriously, I would walk around campus with a baguette, ripping off pieces to eat.  We had bread with almost every meal and I always ate two or three pieces, one of which my sister and I usually dunked in our milk.  After graduating college, Jake and I became strict vegetarians.  We realized that even though Santa Cruz offers a lot of vegetarian options in restaurants, we would have to take cooking a little more seriously to make sure we were getting the proper nutrients in an affordable manner.  Somewhere along the way, all of the hey-you’re-a-college-student-and-these-are-easy-cookbooks became useless to me.  Rachel Ray can make a meal in 30 minutes, but even the vegetarian ones are tough on the heart and gut.  Then Jake suggested a cookbook called “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” by Deborah Madison.  This cookbook quite literally changed my life.  I had no idea that one could be so creative and make such satisfying vegetarian meals.  I was making vegetable stock from scratch, using vegetables I had never even heard of, and shopping at the local farmer’s markets and I loved it.  And when I cooked for others from this cookbook, no one ever said a peep about missing meat.

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     A little while ago, I started a blog on Vegetarian cooking, but at the time was enrolled in a culinary class at Cabrillo College where the instructor loved to speak about using bear fat, eating veal, and how wimpy vegetarians were.  I was in an angry place when I wrote that blog and focused much more on the anger I felt about people eating meat instead of the food I was cooking/baking.  Now, I am a little less of a strict vegetarian, but still feel strongly about the importance of a vegetarian cuisine in a world faced with obesity, starvation and heart disease.

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     Somewhere along the way, I started to bake.  I know that I made cupcakes for Jake’s birthday one year, I know that I followed the French Baguette recipe from French Women Don’t Get Fat, and I know that somewhere along the way I completely discouraged myself by attempting Palmier cookies from scratch (including the puff pastry) and almost caused a small grease fire in our oven when I did not use a rimmed baking sheet for these butter-laden treats.  But then Jake introduced me to another revolutionary cookbook.  “The Tassajara Bread Book” became to me for baking what “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” was to me for cooking.

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     The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown, is a collection of recipes from the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center founded in 1966 southeast of Carmel in the Ventana Wilderness area of Los Padres National Forest.  The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is open to guests from Mid-April to September and also offers a Practice period for students to meditate, practice Buddhism, work, cook, and eat.   The center is known for it’s hot springs, remote location, and vegetarian cuisine (oddly, the word Tassajara is from an indigenous Esselen word meaning, ‘place where meat is hung to dry’).  Some of the food grown in the center is used in an entirely vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason in the Marina district of San Francisco.  Deborah Madison (a UCSC alum) was the founding chef at Greens Restaurant and has collaborated with Edward Espe Brown on many cookbooks.  I consider their cookbooks, my spiritual texts.

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     Baking to me is one of the most basic activities a human being can do.  To me, it is a survival skill, the way some might look at hunting.  Bread has been around since the Neolithic era and is considered one of the first prepared foods.  The process of fermentation, which caused the dough to rise, may have been an accident; a happy accident that has been repeated over and over throughout history.  The word bread may be derived from the word brew or break; brew being related to beer, fermentation and yeast, and break for the way bread was “broken” into bits and shared.  I could go on and on about the cultural significance of bread, about the religious connotations, about the way bread and words related to bread are using colloquially, but what I find more interesting is the way in which so many cultures, religions, regions, all have different kinds of breads.  Tortillas, Baguettes, Naan, Pita, Irish Soad Bread, Danish cakes and pastries; the list is goes on and on.  That’s what I love about bread, it is something we can all relate to and incorporate in our lives.

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     After doing some research about bread, I decided that I wanted to bake my way through the Tassajara Bread Book and end that project with a trip to the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center where I would work for a week.  I hope that I will not tarnish the name of this book in the process and that I do not offend or upset Edward Espe Brown or any of the other members of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the process.  My goal is to share the importance of this book and the way in which it reminds us to slow down and connect with the things that sustain us.