Our blog’s masthead photo has been around for quite a while, so we have decided it’s time for a change. Friend the Spannocchia Foundation on Facebook and submit your favourite photo of Spannocchia using the ‘competitions’ tab in the left hand column. The winning snap will be the masthead for the blog in 2012 and the winner will receive a bottle of Spannocchia olive oil. Spread the word!
A presto…
You know the way you keep reaching for the light switch even when the power is out? And then mutter to yourself when nothing happens – when the room remains dark and silent; no whirring refrigerator motor or humming internet modem, no little green or red or blue LED lights on all the equipment that usually augments our lives. That momentary lapse in memory is not a finger flicked for no reason at all. Nothing happens, but then it does. You realise how easy it is to have things easy, to become complacent and, often, lazy. Trying to turn on a light switch when there’s no electricity is like being slapped in the face with a big wet fish who is mouthing the words WAKE UP. It’s an exercise in existentialism.
It snowed yesterday, a lot. And at some point in the early hours of the morning we lost all power. No phones, no internet, no electricity, little water (since the pump required to deliver it to the cistern is electric) and almost no noise. As soon as I got over the initial irritation of ‘not being able to do anything!’, I suddenly discovered that I could do a lot, and so began one of my most favourite and fulfilling days at Spannocchia in a long time.
No laundry list of achievements - just an affirmation of self and capability, without any of the stuff we think we cannot live without.
A presto…
Last October I wrote a post about bread. This week I find myself at the centre of an expanding dough debate. It seems that I have become some sort of agony aunt for amateur bakers, when truth be told, that’s all I amount to myself.
Fall 2011 Guest Service Intern Sarah Russell is back in Michigan and has propagated her own starter using the ‘breadbasket’s’ finest resources. My sister Anne, on the west coast of Ireland, received (as her Christmas gift from me) a jar of offspring from my pasta madre. So Sarah and Anne are now mothers to their own, erm, mothers (?) and have been updating me regularly on their progress. Sarah’s most recent email to me was an absolute hoot. Paragraph after intense paragraph of inquiry and description. Actually, here, read it for yourself:
Woo hoo! I am about to go bread-wild on you, so get ready. I am just elated to have someone to discuss this with because I have been ruminating with thoughts of bread for the past three weeks and wasn’t sure if you would indulge me.
So, I did get the Tartine book, which is amazing. I am so eager to try so many of the recipes in it, but I want to get the Basic Country Sourdough down first. I got a natural starter going just a few days after I got home from Italy, so it has been alive and kickin’ for almost a month now. I feed it every morning with the 50/50 blend (half white, half whole-wheat) which seems to be working well. The whole bread making process just takes so freakin’ long, so I am curious to hear how you do it? I remember you babying it throughout the day, but I can’t imagine that you devoted as much time to checking it, turning it, smelling it, and just plain waiting for it as I did, or else you really are a saint for making it for and sharing it with us! I made the mistake of starting my leaven in the morning the first time. It was ready (passed the float test!) by evening, then I stayed up well into the night, waking up every half hour to turn it, during the bulk fermentation. This first batch didn’t work. I think that the house was too cool (68 degrees F); I didn’t give it long enough; and my starter may have been too immature. It didn’t rise in the oven at all either. It was dense, gummy, and lacked flavor.
So, this last time, I did as Tartine suggests: I made my leaven the evening before, so it was ready for me to mix the dough in the morning. My bulk fermentation took longer than the 3 to 4 hours that they suggest. After 6 hours, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went ahead and pre-shaped the loaves. After the final shaping, I let the first loaf rise for only 2 hours before baking because I was eager to have one ready to eat with mussels for dinner that night. I was literally floored when I took the lid off halfway through baking to see that it had really sprung in the oven! Glory! Hallelujah! It looked great, there were some decent sized holes and the crust was fantastic. The flavor lacked the sour taste that I long for, and the after taste was a bit too much like soggy cereal. While we ate dinner, I left the second loaf to continue rising and didn’t get around to baking it off until 5 hours after the final shaping (3 hours longer than the first). There weren’t as many large holes as the first loaf, but the flavor was more sour. I preferred this loaf to the first. I don’t know what made the flavor different though. It could have been a number of things: the longer rise after the final shaping, the scoring on top, a slightly longer baking time? Who knows. I am curious to hear your thoughts though, and I want to hear ALL about your processes, and what you have learned, or are still puzzled by.
[…] What do you think about feeding the starter twice a day? I only do it in the morning now, but by around 5 pm, it is at its most active. Then, by the following morning, it has died down a bit and has begun to dry out on top. The guys from Tartine said that they feed theirs several times a day, which is bogus, but I am considering doing it. What do you think?!
Do you leave your starter out, or put it in the refrigerator? I really want to put mine in the fridge because, that way, I wouldn’t have to feed it as often, and I would like to see how the lactic acid production changes the flavor (I prefer a more sour taste). […]
There was more, but this is a blog, not a multi-volume encyclopedia on the properties of gluten. In reading Sarah’s email, I can recall Gracie’s face with supreme accuracy as I fired my own questions at her last summer; Where are my bubbles? Why is my dough too loose? Can I turn this now? What have I done wrong? What her voice didn’t communicate then - but her furrowed brow did - was this; Look girlie, if you can keep up with this bread making business, you’ll figure it out for yourself. We all make our own loaves in this crazy world.
The truth is that you can read as many chapters of Harold McGee as you like, you can investigate the photos in the Tartine bread book with a monocle, heck, you can even work an internship there (if you are lucky), but nothing, nothing can educate you in the ways of bread better than your own senses. If you want to break it, you have to make it, and make it, and make it, and make it, and make it…
A presto…
I am somewhat relieved that Graziella (claims she) is unable to understand English, because if she were to read the following post she might just disown us all for culinary iconoclasm. Last night we used some of Spannocchia’s zucca, garlic and red onions to make a spicy squash curry, which we ate while watching series 3 of our new winter obsession - ‘Black Books’. Here’s the (vegetarian) recipe if you want to give it a go. Serves 8 hungry people.
Ingredients:
1 nice big butternut squash, chopped in 2″ cubes
5 red onions, chopped
4 carrots, sliced
4 large cloves of garlic, grated
A thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated
50g butter
50ml vegetable oil
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 tblsp tumeric powder
1 tblsp corriander seeds
1 tblsp cardomom pods
3 tblsp red curry paste
1 tbslp garlic chili paste
3 bay leaves
1 litre vegetable stock
1 litre of coconut milk
200ml cream (or coconut cream is good if you have it)
A handful of roasted peanuts
Method: Heat the oil and butter in a large, heavey-based pan. Add the onions, garlic, ginger and carrots and fry on a low heat for 5 minutes. Add the curry and chili pastes as well as the herbs and spices and mix well. Next add the squash, stock and coconut milk. Turn up the heat and allow the curry to come to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, or until the squash is tender. Just before serving, stir in the cream and peanuts. We ate our curry with rice, lentils and Francesca’s mango chutney.
English skills aside, I am not sure how well Graziella can navigate the web. However, if she could a) read English and b) get herself on gmail, I would forward her this link. Then I would encourage her to buy a back copy of issue #89 and read the article on page 26. I might also tell her a little story about how rice and spinach ended up in Italy (the Saracens), or certain techniques for making ice cream and sherbet (also the Saracens, who had learned for the Hindus, who, in turn, had learned from the Chinese), baccalà (the Normans), beer (the Gauls, granted though, by way of the Romans), and of course the tomato, hot pepper, maize, the potato, turkey, chocolate, vanilla and the pumpkin (all from the Americas through Spain). But it works both ways too; the petits pois held in such high esteem by the French and ubiquitous in their national food repertoire, first arrived in France from Genoa in 1660 as a gift for the then King, Louis XIV.
A.A. Gill, in his book Breakfast at The Wolseley, deconstructs a popular European breakfast of cappuccino and a croissant in an attempt to show how certain foodstuffs can become situated in the culinary oeuvre of a particular nation. Cappuccino, Gill concludes, is not Italian and croissants are certainly not French. Both, in fact, come from Vienna by way of Istanbul and Ulan Bator; Cappuccino and croissant are the taste of our political, social and geographic union, and Christian civilization; every morning a small taste of history, a covenant with our continent and our culture.
Culinary traditions are well worth preserving but let’s not forget how they come to be in the first place. Who we are and what we eat is nothing but a hodge-podge; a pastiche of movements and misappropriation, of chance encounters, subjugation and unification, of famines and of feasts and occasionally, of gifted peas.
A presto…
Using Spannocchia’s caldaia (the furnace that provides heat and hot water for up to 70 community members) is one of ways in which we can aim towards a more sustainable existence.
The caldaia is the marmite* of Spannocchia. I love it. Others have found it a bit of a chore and quite a few have shirked their responsibilities in order to do… ummm, other stuff. However, this is a pretty serious offence in these parts. If, as a volunteer/intern/education director, you find yourself on caldaia duty, you better hop to it! Invariably Carmen is first to alert you to your failings in all things pyro and that’s no fun. Nor are the looks from guests who have had to wait for their showers.
Simply, the caldaia is a big stove in which we use wood, felled from our sustainably-managed forest, as well as old paper and veggie oil-basted egg cartons. The central chamber holds 1m lengths of wood which, as it burns, transfers heat to water pipes at the rear of the chamber. During winter, this system (ideally) works like a perfectly functioning heart; three times a day, hot water is forced to the open radiators on the circuit. Some water ends up in the reserve tanks (for radiators), while about 800 litres of it should always be piping hot for a nice shower for our community members. While a pretty sophisticated computer system helps us to monitor temperatures and direct hot water around the complex, the prime regulator (and responsabile) is the is the on-duty caldaia attendant.
Earlier this week, Molly, Cody and I were out in the forest breaking up branches to be used as kindling for the caldaia. If you consider the burn chamber contents like a sandwich, the DRY fillings (bottom to top) should be arranged just so; crumpled paper (preferably guides to Florence from the 1970s), twigs, leaves and small branches, smaller logs, larger logs, smaller logs again. Mmmmm, perfect! Anyway, we were breaking up sticks and piling them in a cord for collection later when conversation turned to the games we used to play as kids. All three of us grew up in the countryside with a sibling younger by just a year or two, and so, when we were little, our games involved little more than imagination and an elder sibling superiority complex.
Molly’s games were mostly equine (or cetacean). She had both an imaginary pony (called Gaud) and a penchant for pretending she, herself, was a horse (or a dolphin). Molly would demand that her sister Gail ‘train’ her for hours, by setting up jumps and obstacles for Molly to clear on their farm in Minnesota.
Cody’s favourite game was ‘dinosaurs’. Though he usually ended up playing this by himself since brother Michael was too busy tinkering with Lego Technics in Steamboat. Michael is now a twenty-something electronic engineer with a promising career and Cody? Well Cody’s helping Molly and me break up kindling of course, while occasionally running around the forest like a T. Rex.
Rory and I had a game of downhill races in which I, the older and stronger, always won. But that’s not the worst of it. I would also decide the prize in advance; always a toy of Rory’s so that I never lost pride nor material wealth in our north Dublin backyard. We also had another game called ‘cushion sea’. This one involved taking all the cushions off the sofas in our living room and placing them on the floor. The object was to jump from cushion to cushion without touching the carpet (easy, because we had lots of cushions in a relatively small living room). And if you did happen to touch the carpet? Oh boy! BIG trouble. When Cody asked what the penalty was I told him that we never actually figured it out; too many cushions, too little carpet. He then likened this game to the event horizon of my youth, and suggested we all play a game of ‘cushion sea’ in the fattoria to find out what happens if you do, actually, end up missing one.
A presto… (or not, depending on the outcome of ‘cushion sea’)
*Randall tells me that Marmite is not as widely known in the US as it is in the UK and Ireland. If that is indeed the case, please educate yourself in this yeasty delight!
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