The Man Who Ate Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

yeast seem to do best at room temperature? Yeast was created long before rooms were. Is this a coincidence or part of Somebody’s master plan?
    Last, I wonder at the role of salt. Nearly all recipes call for about 2 percent salt compared to the weight of the flour—much more and you kill the yeast and bacteria, much less and the yeast grow without restraint and exhaust themselves too soon. Salt also strengthens the gluten, keeping it elastic in the corrosive acid environment of pain au levain and helping the bread rise. Can it be mere chance that the chemically ideal level of salt is precisely the amount that makes bread taste best?
    Midnight. The loaf has barely budged, and I am getting worried. Better give it another two hours. My wife has already gone to bed. She sees this as a dangerous precedent. But several weeks will pass before my compulsive baking threatens to destroy the marriage.
    2:00 a.m. Through the inflated Baggie I can see that the loaf has swelled by half. I have preheated the oven to 500 degrees with a thick sixteen-inch terra-cotta tile on the oven shelf and a Superstone baking cloche on top of it. This device, manufactured by Sassafras Enterprises, is an unglazed ceramic dish with a domed cover that creates something like the even, penetrating, steamy heat of a brick oven. The tile undeneath increases the stored heat in the oven and protects the bottom of the bread from burning. Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Viking) has a photograph of a nearly identical baking cloche from 500 b.c., excavated from the Agora in Athens.
    I invert the banneton on the fiery base of the cloche, slash the top of the loaf in a checkerboard pattern with a razor blade to encourage a free rise in the oven—uninhibited by a prematurely hardened crust—pour a quarter cup of warm water over the loaf to create extra steam (a frightening but successful gesture I learned from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book), sprinkle flour over the top for decoration, and cover with the preheated dome.
    2:30 a.m. I lower the heat to 400 and uncover the bread to let it brown. It has not risen as much as I would have liked, and my slashes have become deep valleys.
    3: 000 a.m. My first pain au levain is done! When I tap the bottom of the loaf with my forefinger, it sounds hollow, a sign that the starch has absorbed enough water to turn from hard crystals into a soft gel all the way to the center of the loaf, and that much of the remaining water has evaporated.
    As I know unequivocally from both book learning and experience, bread is not at its best straight from the oven. Complex flavors develop as it cools, and if you love your bread warm, you should reheat or toast it later.
    3:05 a.m. Just this once, I will break the rule and cut off a slice of hot bread. The crust is crisp and tender; the aroma and taste are complex and nutty if a little bland. But my bread is overly sour, and its crumb is dense and gray. Yet I am not disappointed. Butter improves matters, as it does everything in life but one’s health, and I know that the flavor will improve by the morning. Which it does.
    3:2 0 a.m. I am falling toward slumber when my heart starts racing and a wave of dread washes over me. I forgot to hold back part of the dough as the chef f or my next loaf, the entire point of pain au levain. Now I must start all over again tomorrow morning.
    3:21 a. m. I can’t fall asleep. I drag myself into the kitchen and whip up a new chef. This time it takes two minutes, and I am confident it will work perfectly. I eat another piece of bread and sleep contentedly. In the morning, my wife objects to crumbs on the pillow.
    Thursday, June 21. I am baking as fast as I can, six successive loaves so far—six generations—with my new chef. At each baking the chef has grown more vigorous and its flavor more assertive but a bit less acidic. My wife feels that my baking schedule has prevented us from going away on sunny summer weekends. She says it is