The Man Who Ate Everything Read Online Free PDF

like having a newborn puppy without the puppy. She has always wanted a puppy.
    She is also unhappy that every surface in the apartment has a delicate dusting of Giusto’s bread flour. But it is only when I nearly turn down tickets to the Madonna concert for fear that Madonna will interfere with my first rising that she puts her foot down. I refrigerate the dough overnight, as I’ve done with other breads, and find that the final flavor has, if anything, improved. But my bread is still too dense, and I do not know what to do about it.
    Tuesday, July 31. I throw myself upon the mercy of experts. Noel Comess left the post of chef de cuisine at the Quilted Giraffe four years ago, at the age of twenty-eight, to start the Tom Cat Bakery in an abandoned ice-cream factory in Queens, and his sourdough boule is the best in the city. He agrees to let me snoop around one evening. His room temperature is 85 degrees, much warmer than Poilane’s, and the proportion of old risen dough to new at each stage is less than I have learned to use. I watch him form several loaves and realize that beating down the dough is the last thing naturally leavened bread needs. The gas bubbles are our friends. We pore over his books. Noel loves baking bread and the continuous, self-renewing process of pain au levain, in which nothing is ever wasted.
    Back home I round my loaves more gently and find that they bake higher and with a more varied texture. But they still look like my bread, not like Noel’s. A warmer rising temperature sometimes helps and sometimes doesn’t. And my chef is simply not active enough to use the proportions that Noel does.
    I turn to Michael London. From 1977 to 1986 Michael and his wife, Wendy, ran a patisserie in Saratoga Springs, New York, called Mrs. London’s Bake Shop—Craig Claiborne once compared their creations favorably to Wittamer’s in Brussels and Peltier’s in Paris—and now from the makeshift kitchen of their Federal-period brick farmhouse in nearby Greenwich they run the Rock Hill Bakehouse, where they bake three times a week. I cannot count the mornings I have rushed down to Balducci’s or over to the Greenmarket to buy a giant loaf of Michael’s Farm Bread before it all disappears.
    An unstable and sweltering little plane carries me to upstate New York. I am bearing my latest loaf of bread and a Baggie filled with four ounces of chef. Avis refuses to rent me a car on the flimsy pretext that my driver’s license has expired. Who has time to renew one’s license, I ask, when the dough may overrise while I am waiting on line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau and later collapse in the oven? I lose the argument, but an hour’s taxi ride costs little more than Avis’s typically inflated charges. I arrive at the Londons’ farm in late afternoon.
    Michael and Wendy critique the loaf I have brought. Then we eat it with butter from their cow. Their percipient and blond seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, loves my bread.
    I watch Michael make his levain, and he shows me how to invigorate my starter. As you build the dough from one stage to the next, the chef, the levain, and the dough should always be used just at the peak of their activity. We sleep for a few hours, wake at one in the morning, make a ton of dough, sleep until five, when his four helpers arrive, and begin shaping loaves for the final bake.
    Michael builds my four ounces of strengthened starter into levain— and then into twenty pounds of dough. He bakes several loaves with it, and they look just like Michael’s other breads, not like mine at all. The secrets, it seems, lie in the baker’s hands, his art and intuition, not just in the bacterial composition of the air, the flour, or the grapes. A fantastically expensive professional French hearth oven does not hurt either.
    Thursday, September 6. My baking schedule has become less frenzied, twice a week now, and my wife eagerly awaits the finished product. My chef is happy and strong and aromatic, the