This morning I tried one of the most controversial recipes in the world of artisan baking: The No Knead bread.

This recipe has polarized bread makers since Jim Lahey of Co. Pizza made the recipe famous in 2006 through a feature in the New York Times.  

This bread caused a furor among white thumbs and some even went as far as hitting each other with bread sticks and flattening each other’s noses with rolling pins. It was ugly.

Even the band Bread couldn’t accept the fact that they weren’t kneaded anymore. In fact, sales of their Anthology Greatest Hits that features an extended killer–suicide– version of their overtly depressing song IF, have been reportedly on the decline.

“I don’t knead Bread,” said one of the former fans of the band headed by David Gates.

Some 10,000 “kneaders” in top bakeries have been laid off due to this revolutionary recipe.

“For ages, kneading is as essential as flour in making bread,” complained one ex-kneader.” Now, we’re all unemployed.”

I agree. After trying a couple of traditional breads, this one is really something new.

Obviously, No Knead Bread doesn’t need a lot of things that normal bread does.

Aside from not working on the dough, there’s no need for a bread starter. 

With breads like traditional baguettes, a bread starter made up of a cup of flour, some yeast, and water and fermented overnight is required for that fermented taste in artisanal bread. This starter will later be mixed with the actual baguette dough.

With the No Knead Bread, the whole dough is the starter. Once combined–the flour, salt, yeast and specific amount of water, it is left to ferment for as long as 24 hours.

There is also no need for a steam oven to develop crust. The oven within an oven baking technique does that.

Once this dough doubles in size and bubbles up like a living, breathing goo of microorganisms, it is ready. Shape it into a ball, plop it into a heated Dutch oven and stuff it inside a 450-degree oven. After that, magic. Crusty and chewy bread emerges from the flames. Amazing!

Now, the recipe stated that this No Knead Dough could be used for pizza crusts, baguettes, rolls etc. Just follow the instructions in making the dough mixture and then shape the proofed dough into your desired output.

I am making another batch of this dough for Saturday and I am intending to use it for homemade hamburgers. God knows how much I miss burgers. Yes that one, I still need.

I am also making more mini baguettes for an attempt to make my own Vietnamese Banh Mi. 

Like the burgers, the Banh Mi will be made from scratch– even the mayonnaise, liver pate, pickled carrots and Daikon radish, and the meat filing, which I plan to be braised pork belly in caramel sauce.

No knead photos

I’ll be in LA in the 2^nd week of April and I am both excited and worried about my coming trip.

Excited because I can check out their farmers market and perhaps try traditional immigrant cuisine in their side of town. Likewise, I can see my friends and hang out with them for almost a week.

Worried because I can already feel the pull of one of the best burgers I’ve had  in my past fast food life: In N’ Out.

Oh, the Animal fries– it’s called animal because people eat it like an animal. They don’t even have the civility to wipe the grease off their faces. And of course, the Double-Double Burger! What could possible go wrong?

Well, a lot.

One, there is no In N’ Out here in the New York area, and that is a clear path to something wrong because I might indulge. Oh heaven have mercy! I have withdrawn from that unhealthy past life and am trying my very best to avoid CAFO meat and spaceship food.

But I am confident I would be able to avoid the In N’ Out trap as long as I keep my eyes fixated on the magnificent shinny tans of Los Angeleans.

Here’s a place I do want to visit: Birrierria.

It is in East LA and they serve traditional Mexican food. No, there are no nachos, fajitas, or margaritas that you drink in oversized Mexican sombreros in this place.

What they serve is roasted farm-raised goat on freshly made tortillas topped with queso fresco and salsa. How about that!  You could order chopped parts or the entire animal roasted to perfection.

I am pretty sure, I’m getting it whole–with horns and goatee.

How could something so rotten be so good? Smells like ass but tastes like butter.

Well, needless to say, I am a cheese monster. I have written it here and have said it aloud a million times. I love cheese.

But good cheese is expensive. Unbelievably good cheese is unreachable. This realization led me to tap on my desire to once again take matters into my own hands: I will make cheese.

As you already know, I make my own bread now. So armed with this new activity in my life, I am inclined to make my own cheese. I couldn’t be that hard, I suppose. There should be some online guide or how-to-rot-milk-and-come-up-with-cheese instructions that I could follow.

And there it is, The Cheese Queen herself, Ricki Carrol!

She is selling kits complete with the cool bacteria and other tools needed to make my very own cheese right from my kitchen. Isn’t that amazing? Homemade mozzarella, ricotta, cheddar, and Parmesan–all the great tasting dairy stink bombs can be done at last.

I am interested in trying the mozzarella kit and the basic hard cheese kit first. If I produce edible cheese from these, then I won’t look back. Call me the bread man or the cheesy guy I don’t care. Even if I show up at work smelling like sautéed underwear, I won’t mind as long as I can make cheese.

Now, from what appears, cheese is more of a science project. The use of thermometers, living microbes, stainless steel cauldrons, and ancient looking presses seem more like a lab project than a kitchen chore. But it surely looks exciting.

I think if I can successfully pull off this cheese project, I will start to affect my speech with some accents: French on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, when I make brie and gruyere. Italian on Tuesday and Thursday, when I make mozzarella, ricotta, Parmesan, and pecorino. And perhaps, English on the weekend when I make cheddar. Sounds cool but stupid all together.

Like the bread-making and French cooking projects, I will also post my cheese making progress here.

I wonder if McDonalds misses me.

From dough to bread

If Wonder Bread and other ready-made bread companies spend billions of dollars in advertising, then they should allot several millions to advertise exclusively to me because the gap between their products and my wallet is expanding like the universe.

Yes, they totally lost my business now and only some real ‘dough’ can make me go back to their forever-fresh-chemically–enriched bread products.

Thanks to the Internet, I now know how to make my own bread.

Making bread is a joy. The process is laborious and, like life, unfair. I say unfair because the amount of time and work needed to make bread does not equal the actual lifespan of the bread itself. After taking the bread out of the hot oven, it barely experiences the thrill of being. It doesn’t even have time to cool. Instead, it gets ripped, dunked in sauce, slathered with butter, stuffed in mouth, chewed, swallowed, and digested. A goner.

Almost 24 hours working on bread that will only exist for three minutes.

Unfair, but nevertheless, beautiful.

I am addicted to bread making, I must confess.

When I knead my dough with pure tenderness, I sometimes see Sheryl Mae looking intently at me, perhaps wishing that I were kneading her aching back instead of the glutinous mass.

I ceased to care about other things rising as long as my dough rises well.

I proof my dough better than I can ever prove a triangle.

So what have I learned so far? So far, in my quest to make my own bread and bolt out of the industrial supply of bread that never dies, I learned to make baguettes, French rolls, Ciabatta, cinnamon raisin oat bread, croissant, chocolate rolls, and pastry bread. I am yet to try my own pizza dough using the infamous ‘no-knead’ bread.

I look at bread differently now. It makes sense that in Turkey, bread is considered holy. In Turkey, you can throw your spouse on the street, but never left over bread– not even a crumb.

likewise, anything can be dirty, but bread. So if you accidentally drop a piece of bread on the pavement, you can come back the next day for it and it will still be clean. You even can soak it in grime and paint and it will still be clean.

I think we should view bread in the same way, or for that matter, all forms of food–well, except perhaps, anything that resembles chicken nuggets and bread that has eternal shelf life.

It was a snowy Thursday when I decided to brave the slippery roads and visit a music store to shop for an electric guitar. The electric that I had in mind was a cheap one–a no name knockoff that I intended to modify with better add-ons later.

My budget was $100.

But before I drove off, I called my friend, a local music legend named El Rocker, for any suggestions that he thought would be best suited for the project I had in mind.

However, as soon as I told him that I was in the hunt for bargain guitars, he immediately cut me off in mid-sentence: “Why get garbage when you can get gold,” he said with utter force that my iPhone almost rebooted.

“Well, I am not really searching for gold, El Rocker,” I replied politely. “I fancy myself as an alchemist that can transform garbage into gold.”

“That’s not good,” El Rocker snapped back.” “You don’t settle for less if you can have the best. Get a Les Paul 57 Goldtop instead.”

“But I don’t have $3,000,” I protested.

“But you do have a credit card so let’s go,” the indestructible loud voice from the other end of the line commanded.

So I picked El Rocker up and drove to the nearest music store. On our way he gave a lecture about his view of the American way of life.

“We are a very lucky nation. We can have anything we want here,” he said.

“In America, we should always have the best.”

He then said a litany of the best things that that America made available for him: a BMW X3, a 2007 Mercedes Coupe, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, an apartment in the Upper West Side, all the best electronic gadgets from internet-ready LED TVs to robot vacuum cleaners.

He also has a fine taste in clothes and gets them either in Soho, on Carnaby Street, or in Paris. He wears real leather and has enough bling to make 50 Cent look like a penny.

“Living large is living well,” he declared. “You are what you buy.”

He also had a few unkind words for my 1995 Jeep truck: “Get rid of this clunker and get yourself a Jaguar.”

To tell you the truth, it was an exhausting drive with El Rocker, but at last we reached our destination: a small mom and pop’s guitar shop. When El Rocker saw that we weren’t in those big corporate music stores but in a tiny shop that could be mistaken for a pharmacy selling illegal drugs, he went medieval.

“What the hell are we doing in this shit hole? This place ain’t got no shine. This hole is for losers! Let’s go to a real store,” he demanded.

And so we went.

In the music superstore, I saw one of those cheap electrics that I had in mind. And despite his almost violent protests, I purchased the axe for $125.

“That guitar is so cheap, your fingers will get splinters from that god-forsaken fret board,” he said. “For me, great guitars start over a grand. I have an Esquire relic, a 57 Goldtop, a 57 Telecaster, a signed Blackie, a Hofner bass, and a George Harrison 1964 Rickenbacker 360 12 string. I am planning to get a PRS soon.”

Without a doubt, the value of his guitar collection could easily be the GNP of a small island country.

At the end of the day, I felt stressed. I shouldn’t have called El Rocker, I thought to myself. Worse, I was hungry. And the thought of having supper with this guy bothered me, but I had no choice.  So I offered.

“Hey, El Rocker, I recently had a delivery of pasture-raised beef and some winter squash fresh from the farm. I’ll whip something up at home and you should join me for supper. These are all organic and even beyond organic foods. Only the best for you, of course.”

Surprisingly, he shook his head.

“Nah, save yourself some time. Let’s go to Burger King,” he said. “They have a Buy– One–Whopper–Take–Three–Cheeseburgers deal there.”

“ Oh yeah? I suppose, since you want the best, you prefer the order bumped up to extra large size for an additional seventy-five cents?” I asked.

“You’re learning fast, my friend,” he quipped. “You’re learning fast.”