Issue No. 28: Bonjour, je suis a baker now
Oh yeah, I made croissants.
Bonjour, good Friday, and good afternoon.
It’s Holy Week, and I’ve been overcome with a desire to bake and possibly become an expat in Paris. I’ve tried my hand so far at Julia Child’s classique French bread recipe, a total failure on my part. With much greater success, I made Claire Saffitz’ kouign amann and subsequent croissants with the leftover dough. Shall we?
This is, of course, a new venture for me. If you have been reading Editor & Chef for any amount of time, you know that I don’t think of myself as a baker. I don’t like to measure ingredients, and with a three-year-old and eighteen-month-old running around, it’s not like I can just be on call with the proofing drawer.
The last few years, however, I have wanted to approach Easter Sunday with some kind of culinary project, a real celebratory effort to celebrate Lent ending and Resurrection Sunday drawing near. It seems fitting that breads and pastries are what I am drawn to in the lead up to Good Friday. This is my body, if you will.
I started a new book by
, By Bread Alone, in which Kendall writes about cooking and theology and bread making and eating and bodies and church and ingredients, all of it. And so, I am trying to learn a new thing—baking.Now, on to our brief discussion of my first foray into the world of yeasted doughs.
As for the French bread, I used the wrong flour and the bread didn’t rise.
See, several months ago, someone at church came up to me one day and said, “Allison, I had a friend from Montana visiting last week, and he went to your husband
’s Wednesday night class. And he really loved the class. And he works at this grain mill in Montana, so he wanted me to give you guys some flour.” And I could not bring myself to tell her that my sweet husband has Celiac disease and can’t even consider eating that flour. So, I left that interaction with a 10-pound bag of white whole wheat flour.So yeah, I’m still trying to use it when I can. White whole wheat, you say. Indeed. Though she be fair, this flour indeed be wheaty. Don’t be fooled. In my head, I thought, surely this nice light Montana flour would do the job for these nice loaves of French bread? Wrong. But as a total novice bread maker, I thought I was being artisan. Pish posh, get the all purpose. They don’t call it all purpose for nothing.
I read Julia’s recipe a few times over several days. It is probably 12 pages long, so it took me time to a) get through the sheer volume of bread content, and b) work myself up to the attempt. In her usual manner, Julia offers ample discussion of flour types, rising schedules, shaping and forming and turning and kneading, flour dusted canvas for molding your loaves, proper terms for the various shapes of bread you can produce from the recipe. Baguettes! Bâtards! Boules! Ficelle! Pistolet! Who knew! Pas moi. (That means “not me”, but in French.)
So at approximately 7:45 a.m. Monday morning, I started the journey. The recipe is at least very forthcoming. Julia pulls no punches. This will take all day. Well, I had nowhere to be.
I’m not going to wax poetic about the feel of kneading dough, because I didn’t really view this as a spiritual experience, per se, but I’d argue that is mostly due to the fact that my bâtards looked like sad Timothee Chalamet medieval shoes in the end. Did they taste delicious? Well sure, any hot bread slathered in salted butter is ontologically incapable of being bad. Here’s what I’ll say, Jesus has risen even if my dough has not.
If I reflect at all on why I have not made many breads or pastries before, it’s because I always think of making bread about 30 minutes before sitting down to dinner and am googling things like “30-minute no-knead bread”, and if you are a baker among the readers, you now see why I would never be cast on a baking televison show.
But still feeling slightly bugged that I didn’t really succeed, I felt compelled to try again. With the same recipe, you might ask? Of course not. Let’s just crank it up 12 notches and make the ever technically advanced kouign amann. Gosh I have got to stop speaking French.
Tuesday afternoon at approximately 4:00 p.m., I decided to crack open Claire Saffitz’ veritable cookbook, Dessert Person, and realized I once again had time and the ingredients for another advanced project. Claire, just for reference—former Senior Food Editor from Bon Appetit and now author of two great baking books—is an excellent guide on the pastry journey.
Kouign amann are a croissant’s bourgeoisie cousin, with layers of sugar sprinkled in the laminating process, and ultimately baked in tins with butter and sugar at the bottom that, oh yes, turns into caramel during the bake.
Despite this recipe being labeled very difficult, it was actually very easy to follow the instructions. But from the start time to the time the kouignettes, as Claire calls them, came out of the oven, it took almost 24 hours. But hey, if you don’t put someone in a big tent in the middle of the English countryside with no air conditioning in the middle of summer with the world’s dinkiest looking refrigerator and an unreasonably short time limit to produce proper laminated pastry, turns out making croissants is uh not that hard.
So I took my time, let my dough chill and rest and rise, only occasionally took out my pent up toddler mom frustration on beating the dough into shape with a rolling pin, and the results were pretty spot on. My kouignettes didn’t hold their shape super well, but you won’t find me complaining as I ate three of them straight from the oven :~)
With the scraps, I rolled up some tiny spirals of dough and then with the second half of the dough, I shaped them into croissants. I topped half with za’atar and half with raw sugar. They were also scrumptious.
I feel very empowered to enter the pastry world after making these. I never thought I’d say that of myself, because pastry feels intimidating and temperamental and prone to failure. (Also because Mitch has to eat gluten free, and GF flour is *insert thumbs down emoji* and now I’m stuck eating 12 croissants all by myself oh no!!!!!) But I liked it much more than when I’ve made bread.
If I haven’t met you In The Flesh, I’m Allison. I live outside Oklahoma City with my husband Mitchell East and our two precious children. I am an editor and book designer and a home chef, among other things. I run a small bookish agency called North Parade Press. My work here on Substack often explores the intersection of food and faith and literature.
After this little experiment with success, I still would say once again my culinary identity is a bit in flux. The fact that I even feel the need to have a quote unquote culinary identity seems ridiculous. I’m still thinking along this line of questioning. Do I, as a normal person, a standard home cook in my cluttered kitchen, need to claim some kind of identity for what I make for dinner or attempt as a baking project? I’m sometimes tempted to think maybe so? Most people who cook do this. People cook from a particular identity or place, a particular set of flavors or techniques or customs as if to say, “This is what it tastes like to be where I’m from.”
I’m reading another book right now exploring how metaphors in our lives, the way we search for correlating experiences to talk about ourselves, ultimately shape our identities. The author,
, when contemplating her desire for rootedness, writes that instead of being a tree, she is a potted plant, only capable of as much permanency as a potted plant can feel.“Perhaps I am a plant that has grown too large for its pot, a plant that if it does not find real soil to set its roots in soon will become awkward and sad, limbs reaching pleadingly toward the sun at the window, wanting to feel the worlds and wetness of early morning, but always kept outside of such experiences,” she says.
I have been reflecting on passages from her book this week as I’ve come up on one year of living in Oklahoma this week. I had a few tears to myself the other day, for no particular reason I could identify, other than I did leave one part of my life and have tried my best to take up a new place.
Here’s the quote from Joy that’s is coming to mind as I write today.
“It is very difficult to belong to a place, to not be able to escape it, to be bound to petty church politics, racist neighbors, the limitations of this place. And how does one choose a place? There is a loneliness of knowing that your rootedness is a chosen rootedness, not the inheritance of love and history. This was a pain I first put my finger on in the golden idealism of reading a Wendell Berry novel. After a period of wistful desire to take up farming and only use a typewriter, I began to feel a sassier question rising to my pen: it’s all fine and good, Mr. Berry, but what if I have no ancestral farm?” — Joy Clarkson, You are a Tree
Perhaps my perceived lack of identity or kitchen confusion I often come to points to globalized culture of rootlessness. We’re itinerant preachers of postmodernism, proclaiming the news that everything could be ours, that everything should be ours, that “authenticity” is the highest good we can achieve, yet appropriation would never be appropriate. So we draw up our roots, repot ourselves in too small containers, move on down the road, and try something totally new.
In the knowledge and information economy we inhabit, I could theoretically teach myself how to bake excellent French bread. I could teach myself all sorts of things. And I am grateful for the slate of excellent resources available to me to do so. I guess I’m just trying to figure out how to piece all those things together to cook and live in a way that feels more rooted and less transient.
Feel free to tell me this makes no sense and that I need to majorly relax and drink a big ol’ cup of coffee and try again another day. That could be perfectly true. Yet I can’t seem to shake this desire to sort out what it is I’m doing, be it in the kitchen, in my work, in my spiritual life, in my writing.
Blah ok enough with the navel gazing, back to the food.
Did you know cabbage makes an excellent hat? With that knowledge it is sure to be a happy spring indeed.
I’m making a final Lenten meal tonight of a simple vegetable soup. And tomorrow we will begin preparations for a proper Sunday feast. Evelyn wants a strawberry cake, I’m thinking of hot cross buns, and I’ve volunteered a green bean casserole for lunch. I love the preparations and build up after a long season of waiting. It’s finally almost Sunday!
I hope you have a beautiful Easter weekend.
Thanks for humoring me and reading.
XOXO
Allison
These croissants are beautiful! I really enjoyed reading this post and your bits of humor sprinkled throughout. I hope you have a lovely Easter weekend!
I love the cabbage hat and croissants are simply fabulous treats! Kudos to you the expert baker!