Commuting with Collins

What I love about weekday mornings,

especially one of those spring days

when a few clouds float with hidden purpose

behind the brown sign with sans serif letters that proclaims, “Shady Grove,”

is the way one, wrapped inside the air-conditioned cocoon of the subway,

can disappear into a volume for forty-two perfect minutes.

And if that volume is, say,

A slim new book of poetry by Billy Collins,

(Random House trade paper $13.95),

a tiny museum whose canvases are pages and brushstrokes words,

then the world does not so much recede as transform.

Onto this world, I look from behind the vibrating plexy window

at the silent, blinking horses standing in the yard

and sit with a cup of coffee, a cigarette,

a little something going in the noisy old typewriter.

Then the chimes, an indication that the doors are closing,

a cold blue snap into autumn and the car, an expanse of white ink

disappears into the dark tunnel coiling away and down.

The Whole Point

…after a while it started to dawn on me: the whole point and moral of kabbalist religious teaching was that you were supposed to become a religious Jew! Before you could get to all the higher realms enumerated, you had to become religious here on earth according to sixty volumes of Jewish Law, and follow every jot and tittle of the 613 commandments.  So that was a fairly heavy asterisk attached to all these goodies. That was a fairly big hook to swallow….There were all the holidays, there were big and little fasts, there were a thousand rules you had to live by, not to mention praying, morning, noon, and night. And whereas the religion was so beautiful in its visions, to practice it was like digesting the entire telephone book!

Allegra Goodman
Paradise Park, p. 217

Alpine Flowers, Wright Peak, Adirondack Mountains, New York

The Root Cause of Comfort: Good Socks and the Smell of Almonds

I'm in love with my running socks. I wear a brand called Thorlos because I care about the fat pads on the bottom of my feet. According to the Thorlos website:

• Fat pads protect our feet but we destroy them by walking and running on hard surfaces
• Protection is the "root cause" of comfort.

I certainly agree with that last sentiment. Oh, and the package says that the socks prevent “runners toe” too. Whatever that is, I am pretty sure I don’t want it.

Actually, I just like them because they are thick and soft and feel good on my feet and I do think that they help cushion the blow of several hundred pounds of me slamming against asphalt over the surface area of my admittedly large feet for several total hours each week.

I also like them because they are the last article of clothing that are manufactured in the United States.  They are simply awesomely good socks.

So today in honor of Twenty Ten, I decided to bust open a new package that I bought along with my new running shoes a few weeks ago.

It is traditional to wear a new garment at the start of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah in the fall. Usually one will wear a new shirt or tie, or in the case of women, a dress, shoes, jewelry (or all three).  But socks seemed significant enough for the secular New Year which is not as steeped in spiritually. Besides, I’m not wearing a tie today or a dress for that matter.

The first thing I did after breaking open the package was to smell them. I like to smell things and let’s face it, these socks will never smell this good again.

“Wow,” I said, “I love this company!”

The socks were scented with my favorite scent, almond. Then Barbara pointed out that they had been in my drawer next to my shaving soap, which smells coincidentally of almond. But still.

So I recited the appropriate blessing in Hebrew, “Blessed are you Lord, our God, master of the universe, who clothes the naked” (just to be clear, I was not naked at this point, just barefoot) and I put them on.

I ran the same course four minutes faster than yesterday while the scent of almonds followed me through the slushy winter streets of Washington Grove. And my fat pads felt great.

Challah for Converts or Real Bakers Use Math

For a long time, I have wanted to convert my recipe for challah from volume to weight. Serious bakers weigh their ingredients instead of measuring them out in cups and teaspoons. There are two reasons for this. First of all, the weight of certain ingredients, especially flour, can vary greatly depending on how loosely or tightly it is packed in the cup. Sifted flour weighs far less than non-sifted. Cookbooks try to get around this by telling you how to scoop and sweep the flour in an attempt to make your cup of flour weigh what their cup of flour weighs.

Or take salt.  I use kosher salt in my bread, about a teaspoon and a half. Now if you use the same volume of salt but use table salt, you bread will be saltier. Not because kosher salt is “less salty” which some people seem to think, but because kosher salt has bigger crystals so it has less salt per unit of volume.

Why not just bypass the vagueness and weigh your ingredients on a scale? More and more, you see recipes that offer the quantity of ingredients by weight in addition to volume.

The second reason is that a recipe by weight is easier to express as a formula, which makes it easier to adjust the size of the batch. For example, if you normally bake two loaves, which feed 10 people, it is very easy if you have the formula to make a batch of dough for 100. The relative weights of the ingredients stay constant. With the right formula you can also change water into wine, though that takes a bit longer.

I now bake all of my bread measuring the ingredients by weight.

Except challah.

I have been making challah every week for about 15 years and I memorized my recipe by volume long ago. On a typical Friday morning when I am mixing the dough, I am usually rushing to finish so that I can get to work on time. So I have never been able to take the extra time to measure the ingredients and then weigh them to convert the recipe.

But today being both a holiday and a challah-day, I took the time to do just that. My weights are in grams as I find the metric system much better especially when you need to adjust quantities. I never have to stop to think about how many grams are in a kilogram. Everything is tens just like the fingers on my two hands, which are still surprisingly useful for simple arithmetic.

A note on the “Bakers Formula.” The baker’s formula expresses the relative weight of the ingredients compared to total weight of the flours. So if the flour is half bread flour and half all-purpose, as in my challah recipe, the total flour will always be 100 percent. Therefore, the total percentages will always be more than 100 percent, which can be confusing until you understand what it means. For example, if you have 1,000 grams of flour and formula states that the water (hydration) is 67 percent, then you will need 670 grams of water (see why I love the metric system?).

Here are the results of my inquires:

My Challah Recipe by Weight with Baker’s Percentages

Ingredient grams %

Bread Flour 400 50

All-purpose Flour 400 50

Water 350               44

Yeast 6 0.75

Salt                               10 1.0

Vegetable Oil 65 8.0

Honey 115 14

Eggs 115 14

So next week, I’ll make the challah by weight and see if any adjustments are necessary. Of course small adjustments may be necessary because not every egg weighs exactly 57.5 grams and I always use two eggs in a batch but we are talking about a few grams of flour here or there.

By the way, if you want to kick your bread making up a notch, I highly recommend “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” by Peter Reinhart. It is a beautiful book with clear step by step directions that will have you making wonderful bread in no time. He has a nice blog too. You can Google it.

Let me know if you try my recipe and if you convert to baking by weight. I think you will like the results and people will be impressed when you start talking about baker’s formulas.

Happy New Year!