Cook Monkeys

Cross-posted on my personal blog:

For Christmas I received a copy of Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking and I read it cover to cover. He explains baking from the perspective of someone trying to understand the finer details of why certain baking actions result in certain final forms. The book begins with a discussion on the chemical building blocks of baking: carbohydrates, fats, sugars, water, etc. Unfortunately, you just can’t go into a supermarket and pick up a bag of carbohydrates or lecithin so the book then discusses the various basic ingredients you can purchase at the store and what types of basic building blocks are present in these objects, such as eggs. Scattered through these two portions of the book are various digressions into the finer points of what these components do and why they respond to heat and mixing differently, the emulsive properties of the lecithin in eggs, and things like the flour-water hydration that occurs when you rest a dough in the fridge for an hour.

One of the scarier parts of the book happens in the chapter on The Straight Dough Method. All of the doughs in this chapter are leavened using yeast concoctions and typically result in a bread or bread-like substance. This much I already knew from watching and helping my parents make pizza dough from scratch. Where the book started to scare me was when it ventured into a discussion on what sourdough starters are and how they are created and why they make the bread taste so different.

A sourdough starter is formed by putting a sugar, bread flour, and water in an uncovered bowl in a moderately temperate area of your house for 4-10 days to act as an airborne yeast trap and breeding ground. Depending upon where you live on the planet, these yeasts will travel with different types of bacteria and it is these bacteria (the ones that can survive the environment that the yeasts create in the starter solution) that lend the unique flavors to the resultant doughs. Alternate forms of starter substitute milk for water and end up having some alcoholic content.

Let me summarize: you put out a trap to catch and breed free-roaming microorganisms which you will then later feed with more flour and then kill off in the oven.

This sounded completely insane to me. But seeing how it is an established food practice and that the resulting doughs are cooked at 400°F and people don’t regularly die after eating many breads, I decided to try it.

I believe this was a mistake. You see, I live in a small, one-room apartment. Keep this in mind for later.

I decided to make the All-Purpose Starter and the Sourdough Starter at the same time since the AP Starter is seeded with yeast and the Sourdough Starter is left to catch its own. Well after I let the AP Starter do its merry little thing for 18 hours I used a cup of it to make some bread. I let it rise for about 30 minutes and did not notice any change in the height of the dough so I make the immediate decision that I had done something wrong with my starter and I threw out the rest and proceeded to make a second batch of dough using the standard process of proofing my active dry yeast in some warm water before using in the dough. By the time that this one was ready, I noticed that the first batch that had used the starter was finally starting to show some significant rising potential. So I decided to bake both loaves. And both loaves came out fine. I probably could’ve kneaded them both a bit more, but since I don’t have a stand mixer I did the best I could with just my arms.

Sometime the next morning I noticed that my Sourdough Starter had started to bubble and develop a slight odor. As if by magic I had caught some yeast and now I could make more bread with my own yeast, cool!

Not cool.

Ever since I started the starter project, I’ve had a slight cough that slowly got worse. Since I am coming off of a sinus infection and my antibiotics are almost out this was upsetting. Last night as I stirred my remaining starter I had a Homer Simpson “doh!” moment when I realized that the AP Starter that I had discarded in my (open-lidded) trashcan had probably been sending out spores or buds or whatever into the surrounding air which had landed in my yeast trap and replicated.

…in the air…

Damn. I’m coughing because of the foreign bodies in the air. Damn. Damn. Damn. I get like this with mold spores in the air, so why not yeast? Damn. So I immediately dumped everything left of my Sourdough Starter down my toilet, bleached the scum in the bowl and threw out my trashbag in the dumpster down on the street.

This morning I have no cough. My conclusion is that you should never make bread with anything other than prepackaged yeast if you live in an apartment—unless you enjoy inhaling lots of yeast.

“Why are all these American people staring at us?” I whisper to my sister.“Because we’re Chinese.”

Our family sits in a new restaurant, one we had never been to before. It was originally located in Chinatown under the name New Shanghai; now it’s located in a suburb called Wellesley just off of Route 9 bearing the name CK Shanghai. Aside from the employees, there are almost no other Chinese people. The ones I saw earlier have left, and the mass of people at the entrance continue to grow due to lack of waiting space.

Employees are bustling about delivering their dishes to tables, taking orders, retrieving empty plates, and refilling glasses. I take a sip of my water while eyeing the environment. The yellow wallpaper, the hanging ceiling lights, and the small bar make me feel like I’m in a different restaurant. This doesn’t feel typical for a Chinese restaurant, at least the ones I’ve been in, but the random adornments around the wall make up for the contemporary look.

Napkin placed on lap, chopsticks in hand. The first set of dishes arrive at our table. We dig in. Chopsticks reach across the table. Plates are passed to help gather food into a meal. A communal sharing of what lies before us. This is how we eat. This is what “family style” eating is.

I make a quick glance to the neighbouring tables. The people on my left are talking about colleges with some mention of MIT and patents. The two tables to our right keep staring in our direction. I don’t know if they’re staring at us, our food, or at something else. Paranoia sets in, and I keep my head focused on my plate. Yet all I can think about is how damn good the food is.

More dishes arrive, and my family continues to eat. People at the big, round table on our right continue to look at us like we’re foreign aliens. To me, the way everyone else is eating is foreign. They are ordering single dishes as their own. Real Chinese restaurants aren’t like that. Chinese food isn’t the single-serving combo that you get at the small, dirty-looking, local place on the corner where you go when you’re too lazy to cook. To them, the way we eat is different despite the fact that this is normal, instinctive, and second nature for us.

That’s not to say that people couldn’t order their own dishes like they typically would in other restaurants. They just don’t get any real perspective of what Chinese food culture is like. I’m not saying it’s bad that non-Chinese people are eating Chinese food. My point is just that food is more than just what’s on the table in front of you. It’s how you eat it that also counts.