A Prayer For Pumpernickel

Onions cooked on wood coals and The Bunny Kitty.

Amy is in Madison, WI right now visiting her sister and niece. She ate at Forequarter and I am very jealous (Madison easily has the best collection of restaurants of any city of it's size in the country -- it is about the same size and proximity from Chicago as Grand Rapids, but the disparity between the two scenes is...for another post). My jealousy, however, has been tempered by the fire burning behind me, though that tempering has in turn been tempered by melancholy: usually when there is a fire burning in our yard, she is here.

I am of the opinion that every restaurant kitchen could be made better by the inclusion of a wood burning something. Oven, grill, hearth. I say could be because there is ample evidence that bad cooking cannot be improved upon by live fire. Good cooking, however, can. I have gotten into more than one argument with an equipment engineer friend who extolls the virtues of gas and gas assist pizza ovens. He thinks that because the smoke only comes into play by perfuming the dining room that a serious cook, one who cares first and foremost about the results a given piece of equipment produces, would not choose a wood burning stone oven over gas. My opinion, is that he clearly has not spent enough time working with one.

I, however, have. First of all, I am not entirely convinced that gas fired stone ovens perform at the same level as solid fuel ovens. Gas ovens cannot be used efficiently for retained heat baking, which for me is one of the main reasons to own one. And regardless of what you're cooking, recovery time, convection, and chamber humidity are crucial to achieving excellent results. Smoke, as he points out, is only incidental. He is right about this, if you consider the aroma of wood smoke in a dining room as incidental (it is not). The smoke produced by a wood fired oven is icing, not cake. The foods cooked in a wood fired oven are not decidedly smoky, nor are they intended to be. It is continuous, uninterrupted intense heat that is responsible for the high quality of well made pizza crust, deeply caramelized meats, and candy sweet root vegetables. Can this heat be reproduced by a gas fired oven? Sometimes. Is it more than just incidental that the best you can hope for from a gas fired oven is that it might sometimes approximate the qualities of a wood oven? Absolutely.

Second, and more importantly, though my friend would probably be exasperated at this largely aesthetic supposition, wood changes something in the mind of a cook. Turning a burner on a gas range is done without thought. Building and tending a fire is always demanding of one's attention. A wood fire is wild and unpredictable. You cannot hope for behavioral consistency so you must always be vigilant. You must always, as Irma Baumbeck famously said, "stand facing the stove." A live fire forces the cook to engage, to identify, manage, and master idiosyncrasies with each fire, even hour to hour in the same fire. Instead of worrying only about what goes into the oven, you  must tend to the oven itself. But great control and opportunity await the cook diligent enough to become skilled. This is admittedly a lot to heap on the shoulders of some nineteen year old who is only cooking because he can't settle on a major. For someone with blood of wood smoke and bones of fire brick, it is a constantly shapeshifting opportunity to shine.

Lemme s'plain: without a doubt the best thing I have ever smelled in my life was a failed loaf of bread.

I was obsessed with retained heat baking at Journeyman. When I learned what a real loaf of pumpernickel bread was about, I lost my mind. Today, pumpernickel is mostly a white flour "rye" bread made dark with the addition of dark beer or molasses or, in the worst loaves, some fake colorant. But traditionally, in the days when a German baker used a wood fired oven to bake bread, pumpernickel was loaded into an oven when it was not being refired to bake the following day. The slowly waning heat of the oven was the perfect environment to bake a dense, all rye loaf that could coast to doneness over twelve, maybe even sixteen hours of baking as the oven temperature slowly dropped. It got that dark, almost black color, by slowly baking at low temperatures, skirting the line between delicious and burned, not by the addition of other darkly colored things. This was the bread that the baker took home to his family. It was an intense sourdough that staled slowly, over the course of weeks, not days. It was nutrient dense, flavorful, and as luck would have it, a perfect mate to beer, sausage, and smoked fish.

I spent three weeks making a rye starter specifically for this bread. Four days fermenting the dough in precise stages. On a Sunday night after service, when we would be closed for the next two days and the oven would not be refired for next day's baking, I shaped ten or twelve loaves, loaded them into the softly radiating oven, and went home. When I came in the next morning, the aromas of that bread filled the entire restaurant. It was powerful, inescapable, but still warm and soft and elegant. I will never forget it. I won't try to describe it further. It is not possible. It can only be communicated through the nose. I thought I might cry for a moment. I was so sure I had tapped in to some deep culinary vein that had eagerly awaited a hero to unearth it.

But the bread wasn't good. The oven stayed too hot too long and the loaves were dried out and inedible. We had gone to great lengths when building the oven to insulate it so that it would retain heat for long bake days, and the modern materials we used to do so did their jobs well, too well for real pumpernickel. Something, I would venture to say, no one I know has actually tasted. And I knew it right away, the moment I lifted a loaf and felt its dry, steely, stubborn, unyielding texture in my fingers. I was the only one who would ever know the aroma of pumpernickel from the Journeyman oven, and even I would never know the taste. I didn't bother to try again. I knew our oven couldn't do it. For some reason, I just knew.

Natural gas does not yield such days.

In the fire pit behind me, there are onions roasting in dirty wood coals for the Harvest Dinner I am cooking a course for tomorrow. I don't remember how I came across it, but I find myself a little obsessed right now with escalivada, a Catalan dish of eggplant, onion, tomato, and bell peppers roasted in the coals of an open fire, usually served on bread with salt packed anchovy and olive oil. When I read about it I knew I had to find a home for it in my cooking. So the onions for my salad tomorrow got thrown skin on into the waning embers of a campfire. A fire I lit and enjoyed all by myself. An industrial carbon credit's worth of wood got burned to cook eight large red onions. It took the entire night from lighting, tending, burning wood down to coals, then finally cooking. I'm not sure they are done yet. But they smell good. Not as good as a loaf of failed pumpernickel, twelve hours into baking, but they are certainly making me hungry.

Faster Than Coyotes

The Perseid meteor shower happened tonight. Last night too, but then only clouds and blind darkness. I love these displays but forget that you rarely actually watch a meteor. They appear and fade in a graceful flash. We imagine a long and effervescent line across the sky that we follow with awe and admiration, but really it is only a fraction of a moment in a corner of the eye. By the time you turn your head it is gone. But the awe and admiration never go away; they remain strong enough to drive you outdoors in the middle of the night when the promise of a new show is offered.

I wandered as I often have in this idle summer into the cross street in front of our house in the quiet, country darkness. By this time I am several gin and tonics deep, and have dug into the Scotch ale I planned on aging 'til winter. I am standing in the middle of 122nd Avenue and 62nd Street, the place I love more than any other, looking up at the sky, waiting for meteors. And they come. One. And then another. And then two more. And then nothing. They stop.

But I still stand there, neck craned and beer dangling from limp arms, no less impressed by the sky above me than in the meteor filled moment before. The Milky Way slashes the sky in half and the purple glow from Holland burns out the north sky, but is beautiful in its way. I keep staring at the stationary stars. I wouldn't be here if the Perseids hadn't called me out, but this sky, a sky I have had on every clear night, keeps me captivated. It always does, from the moment the sun begins to set and the late afternoon/early evening light turns otherworldly and gives way to a perfectly quiet night. A breeze always blows through the trees at night here. But even on this corner, which is so noisy all day in the summer, from Hutchins Lake, the winery up the road, the cidery next door, it is so peaceful now. Not one car. And I looked up, here, from the top of the hill, at so much open sky.

And as I stood there, stepping a few inches one way or another to find the exact center of the cross road, where the cement was at its widest, or looking up to the sky for the Perseids, I saw a small black figure a few feet away, moving cautiously from side to side. It took me a minute to realize it was Steve, our cat. When I did, I moved toward her to give her a scratch behind the ear. She waited until I was close, then nervously bolted up and moved a few feet away, closer to the house. We repeated this little dance two or three more times until she had me in the yard, where she amorphously collapsed in the dark grass and finally let me scruff her head. She scurried off into the dark and I went inside to refill my beer.

Glass heavy, I went back into the street to see the stars, falling or otherwise. Not more than a moment passed before I heard the very sorrowful cries of Ginger, the youngest cat in our house, and then saw her, and Steve again (her Momma, incidentally), sheepishly making their way toward me in the road. When they got close, I reached out with affection, which they very suddenly rebuked, and moved toward the house. I finally figured out that they were distressed by my being in the road. The road to them, I guess, is a big rock. A big rock where a remorseless beast with two white, glowing eyes lives, who is faster than coyotes, faster even than the wind. It doesn't do to linger. So they coax me back to shore a few short feet at a time, staying just out of reach.

This is the first time in all my years with pets that I have seen cats behave as you might expect a dog to: with something akin to genuine concern for your well being. Arguably I have drunkenly anthropomorphized these events. But a third foray onto the middle of the road led to another visit from my feline sirens, and I am convinced. All the creatures of this hill watch out for me. And even though the glowing eyed beast hasn't shown itself for hours, it seems wise to be at least equally vigilant.

But the glass is heavy and the stars are falling, and I think even the cats understand. Everyone I know would be in the middle of this road if they were given the chance. And there is one. And then another. And two more. And then a still moment, where only the Milky Way and her stars, who will be here tomorrow and for all the days to come, make me forget there was ever a meteor.