ISO Real Crusty Bread

This may be hard to believe, but sometimes I get a little bit obsessed with a food project.

There’s a problem on the farm. We’ve got too many amazing, delicious homegrown tomatoes. I know, cry me a river. But the problem is slicing them up and eating them with Sicilian olive oil, sea salt, and Mandy Aftel’s black pepper perfume isn’t keeping up with the harvest. Neither is snacking on thick slices of tomato on buttered toast. And while these nightshades go great with local poached eggs, there are only so many eggs that I can eat in a week.

Sure, we could simmer the tomatoes down into a sauce or otherwise try to preserve them. But the priority here is trying to enjoy the largest quantity of fresh garden tomatoes as possible. Right now. Of course there’s a secondary problem too. Being in rural PA has its limits when it comes to getting complementary ingredients.

Could I even assemble a panzanella without learning how to bake my own bread first?

Bread is the critical ingredient. It’s a bread salad. Okay, the critical ingredient is really the tomatoes, but the bread really ties the whole thing together. And it needs to be a gutsy crusty bread or else it will just turn to mush in the glorious pool of fresh free-run tomato juice.

I have no idea why crusty bread is so hard to find. Perhaps it’s just further proof that Americans have gone soft. We no longer have the chompers to eat real food. Instead all of our bread has to be light, fluffy and full of dough conditioners.

Call me old fashioned, but bread should be made from flour, yeast (or starter), water, salt and maybe some sugar (to get the yeast going). And by flour I don’t mean soy flour either. Man, it’s amazing what we consider to be bread these days. But that’s another post.

Hearing of the possibility of a good bakery nearby, I drove thirty minutes over a mountain to get to the commercial center of a small town. It’s was true they made their own bread. However, what they made was just sandwich loaves of white, wheat and rye. They actually looked quite good. But their bread wouldn’t have been up to the task.

So I pulled a Hail Mary and went to a decent grocery store chain another thirty minutes away in the relative metropolis of Altoona.

Wandering the aisles of a new grocery store for the first time can be a maddening experience on its own, even if you aren’t hunting for your very own white whale. And this Giant Eagle may have no eagles, but it’s totally giant.

Before looking for the impossible, I was curious about the next-to-impossible. Could I find any capers and decent jarred anchovies. Because without these two other critical ingredients, there wasn’t any point in looking for the bread.

Capers were in abundance. Remarkably, they had one brand of anchovies that I could live with, but they were buried deep in the Italian foods section. I had almost given up when I found them peeking out from the shelf.

Now it was on to find the bread.

There was something in the bread aisle that looked promising. It was from a regional Italian bakery and it had all the right words on it. Things like “Hearth baked daily”. But I looked at the ingredients and it full of junk. Plus a quick squeeze revealed it to be squishy anyway.

Ultimately, it was in the store’s own bakery section where I found it.

I don’t know who I have to thank for the national popularity of ciabatta, but I really hope it’s not someplace like Dunkin’ Donuts or Panera. But this long thin bread has a solid, lightly floured crust. Its bottom was a little softer than I might have liked, but I wasn’t turning up my nose at this loaf given the circumstances.

Steeling myself for a laundry list of dreck in the ingredients list, I took a closer look. Except this bread wasn’t dreck at all. It was made from:

Unbleached unbromated wheat flour, malt, filtered water, levain, salt, yeast, enzymes, cultured wheat flour.

That was good enough for me, and it briefly restores my faith in humanity. Later today, I’ll dry a good hunk of it out in the oven, so it can be even more absorbent. And then for dinner tonight I’m going to try and eat all the tomatoes.

The will is strong, and now at least I have the right tools for the job.