Happy In the Kitchen

A few years ago, I lived through a disastrous home renovation project. It brought mostly heartache and regret, and in the end left me with a home that still needed extensive renovation to repair the mistakes that had been made.

Once these mistakes were corrected, order was finally restored, or so I thought, until I glanced at the kitchen ceiling and noticed a haphazard configuration of lights; it was an arrangement so illogical that it became an ongoing reminder of our chaos, heartache, and misguided investment. I was stuck with bitter feelings until, one day, one of my children glanced upward and said, “Look, we have a smiley face on our ceiling!”

That moment, that new way of looking at a situation that had by then become familiar, transformed the lights into an orderly, artistic arrangement. And so on that day I learned, and I mean really learned, the importance of outlook. I look up now and see a smiley face, and even when I strain to see chaos it simply isn’t there.

In the same way, when it comes to cooking happily and with a joyful acceptance of the task, outlook may be the largest hurdle any of us will need to leap.

Seen anew, nearly everything in the kitchen can bring delight, from bowls of fresh produce to piles of clean dish towels or a set of well-stocked pantry shelves. Take a look around your own kitchen and ask yourself how it makes you feel. Does it relax you or leave you feeling tense? It’s an important question to consider because one way to keep cooking front and center in your life is to make sure your kitchen is exactly the kind of place in which you like to spend time.

In my own kitchen, I feel connected to nearly all that surrounds me, which may be why the work and the setting rarely tire me. I know many of the farmers who grow my food and the dishes on my table belonged to my grandmother, as did many of my serving bowls and platters. My impulse to spend time in the kitchen has been nurtured by these ingredients and tools, all of which have a history. Feeling connected in this way makes it easier to care. Knowing where it all came from makes the kitchen interesting; and then, of course, there is the cooking itself.

Once you master a set of basics, the process of cooking is predictable and outcomes are mostly consistent. The time and care you invest generally correlate with the results you achieve. These are results you can measure, unlike the effects of a day’s worth of other work—parenting, for example—whose rewards and gratifications can be delayed months or even years.

Another aspect to cooking I appreciate is that the kitchen is not only about production and output. When I open myself to possibility it can be so much more, because while I cook I can let my mind wander and figure things out, if not all of the time then surely some of the time. So as I’m cooking, I am moving myself forward in life. When I am chopping vegetables, I am also really dreaming up ideas and sorting out challenges. When I invite my children into the process, I may be working out a conflict from earlier in the day, or helping a child who’s had a rough go find success in a well peeled carrot or a lightly whipped cream. It may look like we’re chopping and mixing, dicing and stirring, but on a deeper level we’re weaving and reweaving the delicate strands of our relationship.

There’s an elegance to all this, to cooking alone or together and well, that can make time spent in the kitchen satisfying and worthwhile. Cooking also opens the door to rituals that are themselves a comfort and that pattern our days at home: a cup of tea in the morning, birthday meals, Friday night dinner or Sunday brunch. The seasons of our lives and, if we are parents, our years spent raising children are enlivened and fortified by food, and the kitchen is where we bring many of our hopes for these years to life.

The kitchen is, finally, the place where we grant wishes. “If it’s a cake you want, then a cake you shall have!” In its own special way, time spent in the kitchen bestows upon cooks the power of magic.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

Baking With Sourdough Is Nearly Foolproof

The tacit promise of sourdough, and of your commitment to maintaining a starter and baking a loaf, is that you nearly always get bread. Most cooks have known an underbaked cake, overcooked vegetables, or dishes that are over spiced, over salted, or altogether ruined. Sourdough is a world apart; no matter the slip up, you will have bread on your table.

Consider overproofing. If your dough stays too long on the countertop before you transfer it to the refrigerator, it becomes gassy and fragile and will collapse when you move it from bowl or brotform to pot. The dough will be a trick to handle, but it will rise again, not as high and round as it would have, but it will rise in the oven and you will bake good bread.

What about the opposite, underproofing the dough? By this I mean leaving it for too little time on the countertop and ultimately baking it before it has fully risen. In this case, there will not be as many gas bubbles as you need to help the dough fully expand, which will make the finished loaf smaller and denser than it would otherwise be. The loaf may also be underbaked because heat more slowly permeates an underproofed loaf. Still, your bread will be fine.

How about forgetting to salt your dough? Here it helps to understand that the role of salt in bread baking is to slow fermentation. So if you forget to add salt, which someday you will, your dough will rise round and high more quickly than usual and you may initially feel pleased with yourself. In the refrigerator, the dough will rise almost beyond the limits of the brotform or bowl, and you may start to feel queasy; what you are seeing is the yeast taking their usual ride, but without any brakes on.

In the end you will bake your dough, perhaps still unaware of your error, but then you will taste the bread and you will know. You will faintly remember forgetting to add salt. You will, of course, have bread, but it will not be bread with any flavor and you cannot salt bread after the fact. Not even a layer of salted butter will disguise this error. The best path forward for an unsalted loaf is to make bread crumbs that you can toast and salt and use to embellish all sorts of dishes. In a way, this counts as having bread.

What if you forget to score the loaf before baking? When you first put dough in the oven, rapid gas production pushes the dough up and out in a final rising burst before the crust hardens. Scoring controls the direction of the rise and prevents the surface of the dough from tearing open. If you forget to score the loaf, your bread will not rise as round or high as it would have and it will tear, making it less beautiful, but you will undeniably get flavorful bread.

What if your starter dies and, without realizing it, you make a dough using DEAD STARTER? This happened to me when I was a young baker never imagining the demise of my starter. So I went on baking, more than once, with starter than had perished or nearly so. The loaves I baked were small and dense. There were large holes throughout the crumb as if greedy moths had taken up residence, yet I did get bread, which in my ignorance I served and nothing bad happened.

All this is to prove what an ally sourdough is, helping to put food on the table through every imaginable distraction and misstep. Honoring the intersection of talent and luck, sourdough reminds us that we are not less worthy when our efforts take a turn any more than we are masterful when in the sun-bright bliss of morning we turn out a golden loaf: glossy and well risen, flawlessly scored, and baked to precision.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul