This I believe...

A baker I am not. The whole scientific process intimidates me.

I still shudder when I think about the impact salt can have on yeast.

Did you know that salt can kill yeast? That’s heavy! How do I keep salt and yeast separated long enough for the yeast to have a fighting chance?

I believe bakers are different from normal, everyday folks. Bakers are born with an innate ability to judge things that I cannot.

They know what the dough should look and feel like, and how high it should rise before punching it down. And by punching, do they mean actually hitting the dough with brute force?

A baker's vocabulary is a secret code with undulating terms such as proofing and scaling, creaming, foaming and of course, the muffin method. It’s a conspiracy.

Bakers know what’s missing after only one bite of a cake or bread. My talented, if militant, Chef instructor in beginning baking class, took one bite of my angel food cake and said, “You forgot to add vanilla, didn’t you?”

How did she know that?

I tasted it and didn’t notice vanilla was missing. It tasted like a sugary but dry sponge. It is a sixth sense that I, as a savory cook, do not have.

Testing the bread and pastry recipes for my cookbooks proved to be enormously rewarding for me, and perhaps I learned more than I thought I did during six weeks of baking and pastry classes during my culinary training.

If I can bake breads and cakes, anyone can. You do have to follow the directions, as the ingredient amounts and seemingly inane processes are developed for a specific purpose, like creating a chemical reaction that causes the bread to rise.

It’s not as free form as creating a sauce, which is driven entirely by taste and appearance. But baking has its sweet rewards.

The smell of freshly baked bread is outdone only by the first bite into a hot buttered slice of soft, yeasty bread.

It’s worth the stress of mixing, kneading and punching and keeping the peace between salt and yeast.

Recommended bread books:

The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Professional Baking, 5th Edition by Wayne Gisslen

Cookbook Review...

Outstanding in the Field: A Farm to Table Cookbook by Jim Denevan with Marah Stets

Facts: Published 2008 by Clarkson Potter, hardcover, 256 pages, $32.50

Photos: almost every page, food and farm dinner scenes

Recipes: 110

Give to: Your farmer and/or foodie groupie friends and wealthy friends you want to convert from chain steakhouses to the joys of eating locally.


Review: If you haven’t hear about the near cult-like farm dinners popping up all over the country called Outstanding in the Field, don’t feel left out. It’s tough to score a ticket to one of the farm dinners unless you’re on their email list or otherwise connected – deeply – in the local food world where the tour happens to stop.

Thirty-seven farm dinners were held in 2008, under the Outstanding in the Field banner, including one on October 12 at Crooked Sky Farm in Glendale, AZ. (Sadly, there is no AZ stop on the 2009 schedule.)

But you can buy their new cookbook that chronicles some of the adventures of founder Chef Jim Denevan and his merry band of cooks and event planners. At $32.50 (even less on Amazon.com), the cookbook is cheaper than a ticket to a farm dinner anyway, which ranges from $180 to $220 per person (for four to six courses, all paired with wine.)

Outstanding in the Field started as one dinner at a farm in Corallitos, California in 1999 and today hosts dinners at farms from coast to coast. We give high marks to the cookbook for the simplicity of the recipes, and the occasional “if you can’t find “x” ingredient, substitute “y” and the sheer number of mouthwatering photographs.

We almost feel like guests from the pictures of the farms where the dinners took place and the warm, conversational tone the authors use to introduce the recipes and in the essays sprinkled throughout the book, like the one on the virtues of fresh, unfiltered olive oil.

As one would expect with a farm themed cookbook, the bulk of the recipes feature garden-fresh produce for salads, soups, pasta, grains and vegetable dishes. Deep-fried okra with a buttermilk-semolina crust, rainbow chard tart and baby turnip soup are just a few of the tempting sounding ones.Fish, poultry and meat get their due as well: black cod wrapped in fig leaves, grass-fed beef skirt steak, and pan seared duck breast with pomegranate sauce.

The back of the book is stuffed with all kinds of goodies: suggested menus, ingredient sources and charitable organizations that all support the “eat local” mantra. We whipped up a batch of delicious savory pecan, Parmesan and thyme shortbread cookies (page 25) with no trouble thanks to very detailed directions, although ours didn’t turn out as “photogenic” and they crumbled like sand when we tried to bag them up to give as gifts. They also melted in our mouth…yum.

More info: outstandinginthefield.com is the official website, and their blog chronicles the tour – outstandingontour.blogspot.com.

How'd You Get that Job?

My mouth is wide open, I'm flat on my back and two pairs of hands are inside my mouth. One of those hands is holding a drill. "So," my dentist asks nonchalantly, "How'd you get that job?"

He's referring to the food critic part of my multi-pronged culinary career. Unlike him, I need multiple streams of income to add up to a viable career.

Food writing doesn't pay much. Neither does cookbook authoring, most chef positions and pretty much any singular focused culinary skill. But add them all up, and I can cobble together a decent paycheck. And generally a full tummy.

After my mouth is safe from prying hands, drills and syringes filled with lidocaine, I answer his question: The same way you got your job -- I went to school, studied hard, got a degree, and started applying my craft. Duh!

OK, I didn't say it that directly (I do have to go back to see him, after all) but it struck me as funny that my highly skilled dentist (and he is a specialist, not a general practitioner) was asking me how I scored the enviable job of eating for a living.

Truth is, it's a legitimate question. Most people want to know how the heck you get a food critic position. And the reality is that in these times, anyone can become a food critic. There are TONS of blogs written by people who say they are food critics. (Although, I'm not sure about the guy who wrote "I ate here once and never will return.")

Professional critics don't have the luxury of passing up the second and third visits, no matter how terrible the first visit was. But there is room for all of us -- the professional, the lay person, the kid (did you see the NY Times article about the 12-year old critic?)

Seriously.... we're not talking brain surgery, rocket science, or solving world peace. We're talking about food. If you want to write about food (and get paid for it), start by writing. A blog. An article that you submit to your local publications with a letter of introduction. Just start writing. Oh, and eating. Actually, it's eating, then writing.