My trips to the library are always filled with interesting discoveries. From browsing around, I can find books on a bunch of different subjects. Not all books are necessarily modern, but most of the books have some useful information in them. One of the sections I’ve come across is the food/recipes/cooking section.
I love to eat, but never really put much effort into cooking until I met my wife. Haha Her food standards are high as fuck though. And she can feel it in her body energetically when food isn’t fresh, or could be overcooked.
One of those foods that she’s particular about is bread. Apparently it needs to have a crisp exterior, with enough air inside so as to not be too compressed, but to also have enough insides to give a good chew. That, and it needs to taste good.
She’s half French and the bread and wine standard is higher than I’ve ever seen. So I tried making a baguette, time and time I failed while using general recipes found on the internet.
During my experiments, I started trying out pizza dough, mostly because I love a good pepperoni and pineapple pizza, or even those frozen Totino’s party pizzas (their pizza rolls are good too, but I’m more partial to their full on pizzas now). The child in me loved Ninja Turtles growing up and Mikey was my favorite character then.
Back to the books, I tried the 5-min artisan bread, and 5-min artisan pizza books. They tasted fine to me but didn’t have quite the right crisp, airy, pillow of bread goodness that my wife was accustomed to. I tried other recipes online, still no dice. Then I came across Pizza Camp, and she finally gave me a thumbs up, for the texture. The taste was too salty (even for her high tolerance), so I add salt to what feels right to me, instead of just following the book’s recipe. And finally, I made a good pizza with a nice outer crust which could double as breadsticks, a flatbread, or a piece of bread.
Now I just need to figure out how to make a baguette that most closely resembles a true French baguette. I want to make my wife happy so you know, gotta do the do.
Till next time, check out this book!
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