Good Bread and Wine

For the past couple of weeks in class the kids and I have been learning how to bake bread. Although I have spent over half my life working with all kinds of food I have shied away from baking. It looked just too complicated, all those different steps involved, all the precise temperatures and measurements. I’ve always been a lazy cook and baking just looked like too much work.

Well, I was happy to find out just how easy it is to make good bread. Like most anything else, all you really need is the right equipment, good ingredients and the patience to learn from your mistakes. The first couple of attempts at making a good German rye would have looked more at home stacked next to a Howitzer instead of inside a wicker basket. The Italian bread turned out pretty good the first time we pulled it from the oven and today we finally produced what is an excellent, chewy and very flavorful seeded two pound rye.

It’s so cool to see how the yeast takes the dough and turns it into something that is literally alive and breathing–before you sacrifice it to the ovens. There are some other foods that serve as hosts for these or other little creatures, resulting in some delicious eating. Cheeses are the most common, some of them sporting visible molds. Then there are the fermented meats and cabbages – sauerkraut, kimchee, some pickles; but many of these are ‘acquired tastes’. But everyone loves bread.

Of course alcoholic beverages are also made by little living organisms as they encounter and thrive upon the natural harvest of the earth. Fermentation in its various forms is responsible for all the beer, wine, whiskeys, vodkas, rums, cordials and fortified drinks that are made. Some of them will even display the telltale effervescence of their active work.

I guess that it is possible that Jesus did not intentionally choose to use bread and wine for the Eucharist. After all, these two ingredients were common staples of the Palestinian people. It was pretty much a given that these two items would be found on the table. Wine was often cut with water, to enhance the dubious qualities of both the water and the wine, but good wine (like Jesus was famous for) was usually served at special occasions. Although we often hear of Jewish unleavened bread, risen dough was also baked and consumed. There were other foods served at the Last Supper, but Jesus used only these two to remind us of his living sacrifice.

I don’t think it was any accident that Jesus turned to bread and wine when looking for a metaphor for his death and resurrection. It’s also no accident that these two foods were served at Jewish holidays. Both bread and wine are the two naturally occurring miracles of the food world. Left alone, both crushed wheat and crushed grapes will invite in living creatures that change both hosts into bread and wine. This is why moistened flour will eventually start to rise on it’s own as it receives the yeast floating in through the kitchen window. Grapes (and many other fruits) will always ferment – in fact, grape juice is more of an ‘artificial’ beverage than Pepsi. Man must work hard to prevent grape juice from turning into wine.

Wheat, crushed, mixed with water and in communion with live yeast grows to become a bread ready to be baked. Grapes, crushed, it’s juices communing with live yeast, turns to wine ready to be drunk. Both bread, wine and yeast work together to become so much more than the sum of their parts. Perhaps we are like the yeast, encountering Christ’s blood and broken body, being taken in and then taking him in to ourselves, we work together with others to raise up his Church. Broken bread and poured out wine, shared by those who remember Jesus as the creator of grass and vines, giving himself to be broken and poured out for our sins – this is what we know as Communion.

What a great gift. Wouldn’t it be nice if, the next time we shared communion, that we served some really good, fresh baked bread? And maybe some good, inexpensive red jug wine? Instead of paper wafers, little cubes of Wonder Bread, Welches grape juice and Christian Brother’s Cream Sherry? Something maybe a bit more aesthetic, a bit more authentic, maybe a bit more…tasty? Instead of little medicine cups perhaps we could try intinction or -what the heck?!- take a risk and share the cup! (We can always offer grape juice for those who cannot or would prefer not to partake of wine.) Perhaps bringing wine back into some Protestant services would cause too much arguing – I don’t know. But there is no reason not to serve some good bread. Jesus chose food for a reason. He probably enjoyed good food. I don’t think it would be too hard for us to give the elements of this meal the respect that they deserve.

And now that I can bake…..

The Wine Minister

Oh, boy. Have I found a treasure while hunting on the web.  Here is a fellow who has envisioned a ministry that uses the best that God has given us; good wine. He calls his site:

WineMinistry

Wine, Friends, Food and Theological Musings

http://wineministry.wordpress.com/

There is a pretty good article he just wrote about how just as a wine label can reveal nothing of the wine’s character, the same can be said of people. http://wineministry.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/theology-buying-wine-by-the-label/

I also like this one about how wine can encourage and enhance the celebration of community ;  http://wineministry.wordpress.com/2007/07/

If you like good wine (or, as in my case, good cheap wine) go check him out.  (No wonder I didn’t make it very long as a Methodist.)

But for those of my friends who are doing the 12 Step he also has another site, RevJavaDude’s Cafe:

http://www.revjavadude.com/

Either (or both ways) enjoy.

Umami Knows Best (More Food for Thought)

What a brainstorm! I have just discovered why Americans struggle with obesity….it’s all about umami. No, not your mommy, but umami. Umami is the fifth taste sensation, isolated by Kikunae Ikeda, a food scientist at the University of Tokyo, in 1908. The other four taste sensations are; sweet, sour, salt and bitter.

“

Umami is a Japanese word meaning “savory” or “meaty” and thus applies to the sensation of savoriness—specifically, to the detection of glutamates, which are especially common in meats, cheese and other protein-heavy foods. The action of umami receptors explains why foods treated with monosodium glutamate (MSG) often taste fuller. Inasmuch as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar to Brillat-Savarin’s concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami

I’ve spent over 20 years in the restaurant business and now teach culinary arts to high school students. During this time I have conducted a passionate love affair with food but I have been far from monogamous. Embracing the French homage to a life well lived; “Viva la difference!” I have allowed myself to be seduced by cuisines hailing from the haute as well as the street.

A challenge I’ve faced over the years has been feigning enthusiasm for offerings that were boring or formulaic, yet much in demand by my clientèle. We find these food preparations on the menus of our great national restaurant chains. With few exceptions, this type of food is conservative, inoffensive and unremarkable. It is very safe.

But if you leave the confines of our sprawling cosmopolitan areas you will find foods that challenge the typical house-broken imagination and its domesticated palate. Channel cats, raw beef, crayfish, chitlins, brain sandwiches, sause, fried rattler, pickled pigs feet, barbecued armadillo, Virginia ham, squirrel pie and prairie oysters. Venture beyond the borders of our country and the possibilities are staggering, if not at times frightening. It seems that the Native American was not the only gourmand that ate everything, including the squeal.

But there are culinary treats that are socially acceptable to the American mindset yet fall into the category of being ‘acquired tastes’; caviar, foie gras, raw shellfish, single malt scotches, good wines, grappa, snails, blood sausage, wild mushrooms, truffles, prosciutto, cold smoked salmon, sashimi, over ripe cheeses….delectables that would stimulate the gag reflexes of many an American consumer. I found it to be very amusing as I watched my students screw up the courage to sample Blinis Demidoff, as they saw in the movie “Babette’s Feast” - and like it!

What is it that the obscure regional favorites of our nation’s backwaters have in common with the commonly held unpalatable fare from abroad? Umami. They are all variously salty, bitter, sweet or sour. Some are spicier than others, some more peppery. Served hot or cold, raw or cooked they all share this distinctive mouth filling quality that the ingenious Japanese have known about for so long.

This aversion to umami on the part of most Americans is in not without chinks in its armor. One reason why ketchup is so popular is that it is full of the glutamates that produce umami. (Funny that those who have allergies to MSG have no problem with this common condiment.) Even more so is good Parmesan cheese, and when combined with other foods high in glutamates (such as tomato sauce and Chianti) the result is far beyond the sum of its parts. Another favorite source of umami is Blue Cheese, but usually cut with mayonnaise and served as a counterpoint to hot sauce. Good chocolate that has not been too adulterated with sugar, milk and lecithin is also high on the umami scale. This all being said, the foods that have the most umami are not the foods that we typically find on the shelves at Super Fresh or Food Lion.

One of the qualities of umami is that it is intense, which is why it is so prevalent among aged cheeses, cold smoked meats and fish, pickled foods and sun dried vegetable and fruits. Bacteria at work in the fermentation process create chemical combinations that result in flavors unique to the host, the bacteria and the terroir. As the water in the food is removed what is left is a higher concentration of this distinctive natural flavoring. This concentration can be so intense, so mouth filling, that little of it is required to sate the appetite of the typical gourmand, occasional gluttonous behavior aside. (No, glutton and gluten are not etymologically related. I looked it up.)

So, since the typical American deliberately removes these intensely flavored foods from his or her diet they tend to eat more of what is aesthetically much less. Quantity is sought to quench the hunger for quality. Could this be one reason why Mediterranean people enjoy ‘fattening’ foods such as cheese, meats and various oils at each meal and yet they seem not to suffer from our dietary afflictions?

What, you may wonder, is an article like this doing on a blog like this? Well here it comes; I will suggest that rampant Protestantism, with its distinctive American puritanical streak, has waged a vicious battle with good food for over 250 years. The weapons of mass digestion employed in this unholy war are despicable and inhumane; tuna casseroles, Jello molds, creamed peas and asparagus, white bread, pasteurized American cheese food, pasteurized everything, potted meat, overcooked pork and fish, mayonnaise, margarine – the list goes on but I can not. It is too painful.

In their attempt to eradicate all things sensual the Puritans in our midst have created a monster in its place. This is an obsession with sugar and carbohydrates that can never satisfy, and a world conquering yet unsavory ‘cuisine’ that threatens to smother the culinary world. Even as we speak the power hungry bureaucrats at the FDA, USDA, AMA and your local health department are conspiring to eradicate those foods that are the most flavorful and perhaps the most healthy. (Why the Europeans, South Americans and Asians are not all dropping dead due to a diet consisting of whole milk cheeses, air dried meats and fish, raw shellfish etc remains a mystery.)

So culinary adventurers everywhere, if you want more out of life than pasteurized cheese product, overcooked meat, faux Peking duck and salty caviar then unite in a common cause. Listen to Umami! And Bon Appetit!