Curious Cook in the New York Times: Better Bread with Less Kneading

In last week's Curious Cook column I wrote about the recent rise of minimal-work, maximal-moisture bread making, which seems to been instigated in late 2006 by Mark Bittman's description of the no-knead, bake-in-a-hot-pot method developed by New York baker Jim Lahey.

There's nothing new about labor-saving bread books. Linda West Eckhardt and Diana Collingwood Butts enlisted the food processor and microwave in recipes for their 1991 book Bread in Half the Time. Suzanne Dunaway  was a decade early with her book No Need to Knead, which came out in 1999 and like current books with similarly punning titles, produces wet doughs that don't require prolonged effort to mix the flour and water evenly. A number of readers have pointed out Jacques Pépin's 1994 recipe for a no-knead bread dough that's raised and then baked in the same pot.

In my testing, the current crop of minimal-work bread recipes is a mixed bag. Wet doughs are quick and easy to mix but also tend to produce wet, heavy loaves unless they're baked into relatively flat focaccias and ciabattas. Large doses of yeast that raise the dough quickly also give it a harsh flavor that obliterates the taste of the grain, unless there's plenty of whole-grain flour in the mix.

The Lahey method remains a standout. It calls for a small amount of yeast, a moderately wet dough stirred together, 18 unsupervised hours for the yeast to raise the dough, and baking the dough in a preheated covered pot, which traps steam from the dough's moisture and produces a good oven spring and an open-textured loaf. It also calls for enough salt to make a flavorful loaf. I found a number of the new wet breads to be undersalted and bland.

For this column I consulted with Michel Suas, founder and director of the San Francisco Baking Institute, which is devoted to artisan bread making. Mr. Suas recommended looking for recipes that call for small amounts of yeast, doughs made with a proportion of water no more than 75% the flour weight, and salt at 2% of the flour weight.

He and instructor Frank Sally also showed me how they had outfitted a cheap electric oven for home bread baking, and demonstrated just how well it works with a 68% hydration dough formed into elongated batards. 

Two of the oven's racks support inch-thick concrete slabs, for baking on and for absorbing high oven heat and releasing it evenly. To produce a strong blast of steam at the beginning of baking, Mr. Suas had filled a large cast iron frying pan with dozens of inch-diameter ball bearings--he suggested a length of heavy steel chain as an alternative--so that the pan and its contents weighed about 20 pounds. He placed it on the oven floor, and preheated the oven, the pan, and the concrete to 550°F, the oven's maximum. He had also prepared a thin steel pie plate by punching a number of small holes in it, and now filled it with ice cubes.

Once the bread was loaded into the oven, Mr. Suas placed the pie plate on top of the ball bearings and closed the oven door. When the ice began to melt and drip through the holes onto the large hot surface area of ball bearings, it turned into steam, accelerating the melting of the rest of the ice and its vaporization. The result was an audible roar, steam escaping through oven cracks and crevices, and 30 minutes later, superbly light and crusty loaves.

Mr. Suas and the SFBI have published a comprehensive book on baking, Advanced Bread and Pastry: A Professional Approach (2008).

Curious Cook in the New York Times: A French Camembert Designed for the U.S.

In today's Curious Cook column I write about a pasteurized-milk Camembert cheese here in the U.S. that tastes surprisingly like  raw-milk Camemberts in France. It was designed by the French affineur Hervé Mons, an advocate of raw-milk cheese, to have the best flavor possible given the legalities and logistics of exporting cheeses to the U.S. market.

Camembert is the iconic French cheese, well into its third century, and yet even the most "traditional" cheeses being made today are very different from the Camembert of a hundred years ago. The fascinating story of Camembert's origins and evolution is told in Pierre Boisard's Camembert: A National Myth, published by the University of California Press in 2003. I gave a brief version of one important moment in my original draft of On Food & Cooking, but it was cut from the published book. Here it is, to give a taste of the story that Boisard tells in detail.

            One vivid and visible example of the scientific simplification of cheese is the career of French Camembert as described by Pierre Boisard. Camembert is the youngest of the great cheeses; it was developed around 1800 in Normandy as an especially moist, delicate variant of local cow’s milk cheese. A blend of raw evening and morning milk was curdled slowly, over several hours, by a small amount of rennet and the milk’s acidity. This whole fragile curd was then gently ladled into molds to drain by gravity alone for 12 to 24 hours. The resulting cheese was then salted, rested for a few days, and then turned daily in a cool, moist room for 3 weeks, during which it became naturally covered with a complex, multicolored coat of microbes, including gray yeasts, red bacteria, and a common mold of the genus Penicillium  that starts out off-white, but matures to a blue-green. Once it began to soften, it was taken to a “cave de perfection” and ripened for another 3 to 4 weeks at about 55˚F/13˚C. The slow, gradual microbial action caused the curd to become meltingly soft and deeply flavored. The best cheesemakers aimed to obtain as light-colored a coat as possible and to avoid a green coat (they called it “black”) because green cheeses never developed proper texture or flavor. If the mold remained off white, the cheese would ripen well.

            Enter the microbiologists! Enlisted around 1895 by agriculturalists in Meaux to help make the ripening of Camembert’s cousin, Brie, more predictable, a manufacturer of millstones named Georges Roger sought advice from the Institut Pasteur, and then succeeded in purifying and patenting a mold culture that never turned blue or green; it remained pure white. Brie cheesemakers adopted it rapidly. Camembert makers were reluctant, and backed up by Professor P. Mazé of the Institut Pasteur, who found in 1905 that the traditional mold was indispensable to high quality. “P. candidum does not expose the cheesemaker to the many inconveniences that the use of P. album holds in store . . . [however] this effort has not produced good results in practice. The cheeses that carry P. candidum are ripened only with difficulty and do not possess the finesse of the true cheeses of Brie and Camembert. They are covered with a thick bed of white spores that  could be mistaken for a bed of plaster.”

            Eventually, however, plaster white won out: it made all Camemberts look good, and apparently urban consumers also liked the hygienic, antiseptic appearance and perhaps the less rural flavor. It turned out that the white mold attacked the cheese protein relatively weakly; the green mold’s enzymes were more active and produced a stronger flavor. Its color was not significant in itself, but rather was a kind of acidity indicator; it grew and greened fastest when the cheese surface was too acid to allow proper breakdown of its proteins; but if the ripening room encouraged yeasts and bacteria to grow first, they created desirable alkaline conditions that retarded the mold greening.

            Our standard white Camembert and Brie, then, are barely a century old; and what was once a slow, spontaneous maturation of 7 to 10 weeks has been telescoped into 3 or 4. Their absence of color signals the loss of their original character.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Distilling fresh flavors in the cold

In today's Curious Cook column in the New York Times, I write about a distillation method for concentrating aromas that keeps them especially fresh. Vacuum or cold distillation is being used to manufacture distinctive new gins, and chefs and bartenders are adapting a tabletop lab device called a rotary evaporator to create startling new dishes and drinks. This exploration is going on in Europe and Asia, but not openly in the U.S., where distillations involving alcohol are effectively illegal. David Arnold, leading rotovap jockey and director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, describes the virtues of vacuum distillation and why he thinks it should be legal.

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Arnold, D. Rotary evaporation in the kitchen

Greer, D. et al. Comparison of a novel distillation method versus a traditional distillation method in a model gin system using liquid/liquid extraction. J. Agric. Food Chemistry 2008, 56: 9030-36.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf801308d

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Slowing the spoilage of fresh berries

In today's Curious Cook column I write about a simple hot-water treatment that slows the spoilage of berries fresh from the market.

The treatment goes back to research done at the Fresno, California station of the USDA in the 1960s. It's been widely studied since then as an option for fruit producers and distributors, but no one seems to have told consumers about it.

The term "thermotherapy" appears in Portuguese and English in a paper from Brazil about the fruits of Spondias mombin, a mango and cashew relative known by many names, including "hog plum."
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Couey, H.M. and M.N. Follstad. Heat pasteurization for control of postharvest decay in fresh strawberries. Phytopathology 1966, 56: 1345-47.

Karabulut, O.A. et al. Control of postharvest diseases of organically grown strawberries with preharvest applications of some food additives and postharvest hot water dips. J. Phytopathology 2004, 152: 224-28.

deBrito, C.H. et al. Thermotherapy for post harvest pathogens on Spondias fruits. Acta Scientiarum-Agronomy, 2008. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Thermotherapy for post harvest pathogens on Spondias...-a0193756598

Fan, L. et al. Effect of hot water treatments on quality of highbush blueberries. Journal of Food Science 2008, 73(6):M292-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-3841.2008.00838.x

Vicente, A.R. et al. Maintenance of fresh boysenberry fruit quality with UV-C light and heat treatments combined with low storage temperatures. J. Horticultural Sci. Biotechnology 2004, 79: 246-51.

Adegoroye, A.S. and P.A. Joliffe. Initiation and control of sunscald injury of tomato fruit. J. Am. Soc. Hortic. Sci. 1983, 108:23-28.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Tomato leaves

In today's Curious Cook column I write about tomato leaves, which have an undeservedly toxic reputation. Like other members of the disreputable nightshade family, tomato plants do contain alkaloids, but the tomato alkaloid is poorly absorbed in the body and lowers LDL cholesterol levels. Tomato leaves have occasionally been used as a herb without any reported problems. Their flavor runs from viney to grassy to tea-like, depending on how they're handled.
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Friedman, M. et al. Tomatine-containing green tomato extracts inhibit growth of human breast, colon, liver, and stomach cancer cells. J. Agric. Food Chemistry 2009, 57: 5727–5733.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf900364j

Friedman, M. et al. Protective effect of dietary tomatine against dibenzo[a,l]pyrene (DBP)-induced liver and stomach tumors in rainbow trout. Mol. Nutr. Food Res. 2007, 51: 1485 – 1491.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mnfr.200700176

Friedman, M. Tomato glycoalkaloids: Role in the plant and in the diet. J. Agric. Food Chemistry 2002, 50:5751-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf020560c

Burrows, G.E. and R.J. Tyrl. Toxic Plants of North America. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2001.

Shlosberg, A. et al. Effect of feeding dried tomato vines to beef cattle. Vet. Human Toxicology 1996, 38:135-36.

Abudogupur, I.K., T. Tago. Method of effective utilization of tomato leave and branch. Japanese patent application JP2008142064 A, 2008.

Jeurissen, S.M.F. et al. Basil extract inhibits the sulfotransferase mediated formation of DNA adducts of the procarcinogen 1'-hydroxyestragole by rat and human liver S9 homogenates and in HepG2 human hepatoma cells. Food and Chemical Toxicology 2008, 46: 2296–2302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2008.03.010

Curious Cook in the New York Times: American dry-cured hams, country and European-style

In Wednesday's Curious Cook column I write about the new wave of fine American hams, cured with salt and eaten uncooked, like Spanish jamón iberico and serrano and Italian prosciutto.

Last month I attended the 5th World Congress of Dry-cured Hams, which was held in the Spanish town of Aracena, near Sevilla. I enjoyed some remarkable jamón there and learned a great deal from producers, scientists, and ham lovers. I'll be writing more about this later on.

In the meantime, if you like ham and haven't read David Arnold's brief and brilliant treatise on the subject, published a couple of years ago in Food Arts, get it here. It's packed with information and beautifully written.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Asparagus snapping

In the May 6th edition of The Curious Cook, I write about asparagus: why and how it toughens after harvest, how to slow its toughening, and whether snapping the stalk really separates the tough from the tender.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Making yogurt and crème fraîche

In this month's column I write about cultured dairy products and how to make them at home. I've also put together a recipe for a hybrid between two Indian desserts, easy shrikhand (sweetened drained yogurt) and tricky mishti doi (milk cooked down by about half, then fermented into yogurt). It sweetens a drained yogurt with its own whey, cooked down with sugar to make a tart caramel.

For two dozen unusual recipes from the yogurt belt (Eastern Europe to India), including "proto-pasta" made from yogurt and wheat, see Anne Mendelson's recent and fine book Milk (Knopf, 2008).

Cooking pasta in minimal water: seconds

My Times column of last Wednesday incited dozens of readers to write, more by far than any other column has done. Here's a summary of what I heard from you.


To my surprise, no one seriously objected to the idea of cooking pasta in much less water than the usually prescribed 4 to 6 quarts per pound. A couple of readers doubted that fresh pasta can be cooked this way. I doubted it too, until I tried it.

Many people have been cooking pasta in minimal water, including Sicilians in Sicily and here in the U.S., and parents of young children who are impatient to eat. Frequent campers point out that the savings in water and energy are especially valuable in outdoor cooking.

Some people, including Ligurian olive growers and chef Alain Ducasse, have been cooking small pasta shapes in the manner of a risotto, starting with a small amount of liquid and making frequent additions as the liquid is absorbed. The released starch helps thicken the liquid into a sauce. (Thanks to Patrick Wang for the link.) The Valencian dish fideuà is a version of paella made with pasta instead of rice.

Many people bring pasta and a reduced volume of water to the boil, then turn the heat off while the pasta cooks through. Some use an infomercial product, a plastic tube, designed for this method. Off-heat finishing does work (the pot temperature stays plenty high), and saves the energy of keeping the water at the boil.

A number of technically minded readers suggest other ways of saving energy. Start the water in an electric kettle, which is more efficient than a pot on a burner. Put the lid on the pot to prevent heat from escaping via evaporation. Once the pasta is cooked, keep the water in the pot and let it contribute its heat to the dwelling, rather than pouring it down the drain. (Works best in winter.)

Some readers avoid wasting pasta water by adding it to soups. Others add it to their gardens.

My thanks to everyone who took the time to write!

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Cooking pasta in minimal water

In today's Curious Cook column, I write about a different way to cook pasta: starting in cups of cold water instead of quarts at a rolling boil. The pasta comes out fine, and the small amount of leftover cooking water is thick, delicious, and useful.