A happy coincidence

Berlin, at least as I experienced it, is a city with a complicated personality, one that I feel I can't really have begun to fathom having had only two weeks there. I think I'd need more time, a lot more time, to wander its streets and to piece together what I'd find, to really say anything definitive. Still, I'll say this much--Berlin is a city that resists easy definition, a city that's a lot of things. Parts of it have the look, the feel, the grandeur of another time. My first night there, I followed the cobbled streets from the hotel towards the Spree, the river that runs through the city. Reaching the river, I was taken aback by the view--the Bode Museum towered at a fork in the waters, its dark, gilded dome awash in the setting sun. It was magical. And the city kept doing this, kept leaving me breathless when I'd least expected it. I'd turn a corner and stumble into a beautiful shaded courtyard, or I'd lose my way in a neighbourhood and find myself at the gates of an old palace. And just walking through the halls of the Neues Museum, those light-filled, airy halls, was worth the price of admission. But for all that, Berlin never felt old or tired or stuck up. There was too much going on in its streets, in its myriad, hidden courtyards, for it to feel anything like that. People were gathered, wherever I was in Berlin--in lines waiting for kebap, in spirited protest in the streets, at market stalls overflowing with chanterelles, in leafy, light-strung courtyards, drinking the night away. Berlin to me felt young, alive, still in the midst of finding and defining itself.

And the food, I think, reflected this, this complicatedness about Berlin. I ate plenty that was decidedly very German--leberkäse with mustard, a sort of pinkish slab of finely ground pork, onions, and liver, the edges crisp and golden from baking, the best and simplest of potato salads, sharply dressed and slicked with olive oil (Cafe Sgaminegg), a meltingly tender pork knuckle, flaky pastries chock-full of poppy seeds (Brot und Butter), and Wienerschnitzel, of course. But I also ate lots that was decidedly and excitingly less traditional--a pizza with perfectly crisp, blistered crust scattered with edible blossoms (Prinzessinnengarten), a crunchy, hazelnut-crusted potato dumpling suspended over green gazpacho (Lucky Leek), gem-like squares of lokum whose flavour lingered hauntingly in the mouth (Confiserie Orientale), morsels of sesame-coated, sweet-miso fudge savoured between sips of matcha (Oukan). So Berlin's food scene, like the rest of the city, I would say, resisted definition, was a lot of things. 

Of the city's more traditional offerings, vollkornbrot was definitely a favourite of mine. Vollkornbrot is a dark, dense, seed-studded whole-grain rye bread. And, quite frankly, to those of us most familiar with the lofty, open-crumbed loaves of a more French provenance, it can look a little uninviting, a little intimidating, even--like you might break a tooth on your first bite. But let me assure you, vollkornbrot is wonderful stuff. There's an earnestness to its dense, coarse crumb, which, I think, is all the more appropriate to its dark, complex flavour. I braved a slice at one of my first breakfasts in Berlin, and after that, I always made sure to look for one of those tell-tale dark, squat loaves wherever I was.

I knew that I would miss vollkornbrot back at home. I was determined to find a way to make it myself. It didn't take much--as it happened, the last issue of Lucky Peach (my airplane/laundromat reading for the trip) included a recipe. A happy coincidence. I got started as soon as I could.

Making vollkornbrot doesn't take much, though you do need sourdough starter for the levain. (Making friends with a more intrepid baker than yourself can come in handy for this part.) The night before, you start the levain and soak sunflower and flax seeds in water. Soaking the seeds prevents them from pulling water from the bread and helps to keep the loaf moist. In the morning, you mix the levain and seeds with the remaining ingredients--coarse rye flour, hot water, and salt. Then, you transfer the dough directly to loaf pans to proof. There's no kneading, no shaping involved. After that, the loaves just need a thorough bake.

The resulting vollkornbrot is incredible. The long bake leaves the exterior of the loaves dark and toasty and brings out a nutty, almost coffee-like sweetness in the rye. I'm not sure that I've had bread crust more flavourful, more complex. This gives way to a moist, dense, seed-speckled crumb with the distinctive sourness of a long, wild-yeast-driven proof. I like starting my morning with some, thinly sliced and generously buttered, sometimes topped with a spoonful of preserves. But maybe one of these days, when I'm feeling really nostalgic for Berlin, I'll have to have my vollkornbrot like the Germans do and pile my buttered slices with some good cured meat.

Rhonda Crosson's Vollkornbrot
Adapted, just a little, from Lucky Peach no. 4

Note: About the flour. I had trouble finding rye flour milled to an appropriate coarseness, so I used a combination of stone-ground medium-grind rye and rye meal. The latter is basically rye berries ground to the consistency of something more like steel-cut oats than flour. (You can find rye meal pretty easily through Amazon, if it isn't available at your local grocery store.) I decided on the ratio by feel. It ended up being about 40 percent rye meal and 60 percent medium-grind flour, which I liked quite a lot. About the loaf pans. I made my loaves in 4" by 8" loaf pans, letting the dough proof for about 4 hours, just until it crested over the lip of the pans. If you own a pain-de-mie loaf pan, this might be the time to use it. I saw a lot of loaves of vollkornbrot in Berlin with those perfectly rectangular sides. There's something aesthetically pleasing about that.
UPDATE, 2013-01-30. About its shelf-life. I haven't yet tested the recipe's claim that this bread will last for months in the fridge, but I have tried storing a loaf, very tightly wrapped, for three or so weeks. It does keep remarkably well in the fridge, though, unsurprisingly, it is a tad drier around the edges, more so than I would like. I've found that this is nothing a quick spell in the toaster and a good slathering of butter (or mashed avocado and salt) won't fix. Even so, I might stick to baking one loaf at a time in the future.

RYE LEVAIN:
53 g sourdough starter
538 g coarse rye flour (see note above)
457 g water

SOAKER:
92 g flax seeds
92 g sunflower seeds
182 g water

FINAL DOUGH:
350 g coarse rye flour
218 g hot tap water
20 g fine sea salt

Make the levain. In a large bowl, combine the levain ingredients and mix by hand. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to ferment at room temperature overnight, about 8 to 12 hours, until the mixture is gassy and doubled in size. Meanwhile, combine the soaker ingredients and cover with plastic wrap. Allow to soak at room temperature overnight, 8 to 12 hours.

The next day, combine the levain, soaker, and remaining ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer. Using the paddle attachment on slow speed, mix until very well incorporated and smooth--this could take up to 10 minutes. Slow speed is important to avoid breaking up the delicate pentosans, the gummy sugars responsible for the structure in rye breads. The resulting dough, though cohesive, should be rather wet and batter-like. Rye, unlike wheat, has very little gluten in it.

Portion the dough into two 9-1/2" by 5" loaf pans that have been greased and lightly coated with rye flour. Using wet hands, press down to level out the dough and smooth the surface. Proof in a warm place until the dough almost reaches the top of the pan. This will take anywhere from 2 to 6 hours.

Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Bake the loaves for 40 minutes, then drop the temperature to 400 degrees F and bake for another 30 to 40 minutes, until the top of the loaf is very brown. A thorough bake is important with a dense rye like vollkornbrot. If it isn't baked all the way through, it will be gummy and sticky.

After baking, let the bread cool completely--as long as a whole day--before slicing. Wrapped very tightly in the fridge, this bread will keep for three or four months.
Makes two 9-1/2" by 5" loaves.

Romanian Holiday

My summer, for a number of reasons, was hectic. But earlier this month, my boyfriend and I finally hopped on a plane, vacation-bound...sort of. You see, my boyfriend grew up in Romania and hadn't been back to see his extended family in fourteen years. So, he decided that it was about time to pay all of those great aunts, first cousins once removed, and grandmothers a visit, and he thought that I should come along to meet them all. So, with bags packed, off we went.

I wasn't sure what to expect. My only preparation for the trip came in the form of my boyfriend's occasional anecdotes about his childhood and a couple of Romanian films set in the pre-revolution era, all of which led me to believe that it wouldn't be much of a vacation. I was wrong. It was a great trip--one I imagine that might even have made Tony Bourdain proud (there is a No Reservations Romania episode, but it isn't terribly good). We ate a lot and well. We drank far more than we should have, encouraged as we were by our generous hosts. We caught a few good glimpses of Romanian life. It was all very satisfying.

Now, you couldn't mistake Romania for one of its western European neighbours, but that's part of its charm. It has that distinctive post-communist feel to it (think East Berlin or urban China)--the drab, utilitarian apartment complexes whose concrete faces have not weathered the decades well, the old government buildings with their hulking, megalomaniacal grandeur--but step inside and most of it (at least in Bucharest, the capital) has been transformed. Part of the old House of the People (a seriously hulking monument to communism--the only building bigger in the world, apparently, is the Pentagon), for example, is now a contemporary art museum. All of Romania, it seemed to me, was like this, a hodgepodge of the old and new, a place with serious history now starting to find its modern identity--Roman ruins alongside 20th century war memorials, a once-opulent seaside casino looking out on today's beach-goers.

The best food, however, was straight-up peasant fare--tripe soup, cabbage rolls, pickles of all sorts, sausage, grilled meat, fresh cheese, fish just pulled out of the Black Sea. (Yes, we put our vegetarianism on hold for the trip--its status now is a bit up in the air.) We ate at a fair number of good restaurants in a couple of different cities--Bucharest, the lively, very urban capital, and Constanța, a smaller, coastal city in the southeast--but my favourite meals were definitely the ones we had at home with family and friends, serious multi-course meals, presided over by one or another of my boyfriend's grandmothers. As I said, a great trip.

Now, I was only there for about ten days, so I'm hardly an authority on all things Romanian. Our trip was limited to a few cities in the east, where my boyfriend's friends and family are scattered--Bucharest and Constanța, which I've mentioned, as well as Iași, a city in the northeast. But here's a list of ten highlights from my trip, in no particular order.

The people: everyone I met on my trip was incredibly welcoming and generous. Old friends of my boyfriend opened their homes to us and took us around for glimpses of their cities and tastes of Romanian life (and food, of course). We were taken to markets, to the seaside, and even to an old, decrepit factory in Bucharest whose rooms were being rented out as inexpensive artist's studios. In turn, both my boyfriend's grandmothers fed us only as grandmothers can--think warm bowls of comforting, stewy goodness and three kinds of dessert at the end of every meal. And, towards the end of the trip, one of my boyfriend's uncles hosted a ridiculously good barbecue. There was so much great food and drink that I needed a nap between the main course and dessert. Luckily, there was a hammock on the rooftop terrace just waiting for me.

Sarmale: now, cabbages rolls are hardly anything exotic. Even my grandmother used to make them for Christmas dinners, and my family isn't at all Eastern European. The cabbage rolls (or sarmale) that I had in Romania, however, were something else--basically, elegant little cigar-sized packets of fatty, meaty, flavourful goodness (the ones we had in Iași especially so). Eaten with a little sour cream and a side of polenta and fresh farmer's cheese, there are few things better.

Mici: When we decided that we were going to eat whatever my boyfriend's family put on our plates in Romania--animal or vegetable--he got especially excited about one thing, mici. There isn't quite anything like them that most North Americans would be familiar with--the closest thing might be Turkish kebabs. But all you really need to know about mici is that they're an amazing blend of fatty ground lamb, beef, and pork marinated in beef stock and heavily punctuated with garlic that are shaped into generous oblong parcels and grilled over charcoal--in other words, delicious meat in tube form. We had these a couple of times at restaurants (they're more of a restaurant thing than an at-home thing), but the best were definitely the ones that my boyfriend's uncle grilled up at the barbecue. They lived up to my boyfriend's childhood memory.

The Black Sea: where my boyfriend grew up, he was just a short walk from the Black Sea. He would spend his summers swimming in it, and his grandfather would take him fishing on the weekends. We didn't have a chance to take a dip, but we walked along the beach and got our fill of the tiny fish he used to catch at a nearby restaurant.

Eating outdoors: a Berlin-based philosophy professor complained to us recently with his usual wryness that Americans didn't seem to enjoy spending time outdoors, that there weren't any places in and around the university, for instance, where you could sit outside and enjoy a beer or a coffee. I tried to defend our neighbourhood at the time, but having spent some time in Romania, I think he might be right...at least about Chicago. Apart from some family meals, we pretty much only ate outside in Romania, and it was great. Even the heart of Bucharest, restaurants managed to make room for good-sized patios, little havens from the bustle of the city out in the open air.

Driving through the mountains: I was a little sceptical when my boyfriend's uncle in Iași announced that we were going to spend the day visiting the many Orthodox churches and monasteries in the region. But, when I stepped out of the car after a couple hours of driving and found myself in a small village, I was struck by the stillness and serenity there. When you live in a city, you forget what silence is really like. Visiting the churches, which were rather beautiful, by the way, (the walls of Orthodox churches are always covered with gorgeous murals depicting biblical scenes and the lives of saints), was restorative. One of my favourite bits of that day was driving from one particular church to another--we took an old, narrow, densely wooded trail that took us from one side of a mountain to the other. It was bumpy, precarious, and thrilling. The air was thick with the scent of evergreens.

Ţuică: every culture, it seems, has its own clear, distilled, and fiery liquor. The Romanians' is ţuică, a sweet but hair-raising spirit made from plums. I'm sure that were it not for the supervision of one grandmotherly figure or another, the rest of the family would have insisted that we drink more of it. But, after too much wine and whisky already, one shot was definitely enough.

Roman ruins: the Romans annexed the territory on which present-day Romania sits before the 1st century AD and held it for a couple hundred years. As a result, broken columns and bits of Roman masonry are pretty common all over the place. I didn't get to run around a playground with two-thousand-year-old ruins just lying around when I was a kid. Did you?

Nicolae Comanescu: when we headed to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, I didn't really feel up to contemplating much art. I was happy to nurse cappuccinos on the warm, sunny terrace outside. But I'm glad that we went in. I'm not usually one for contemporary art, but I love Comanescu's work. Some of his pieces that we saw were bold, vivid, and playful collisions of beach scenes and familiar cityscapes. Others were sombre and atmospheric glimpses of Berceni, a neighbourhood in Bucharest. I would love to have one of his pieces hanging my living room.

The produce: pretty much all of the produce we ate in Romania was really fantastic, and the Romanians were nonchalant about it. There was no hype about heirloom varieties of peppers or tomatoes--a pepper was a pepper, and you ate them now, just as they were coming into the markets, or you roasted them and brined them by the bushel for the rest of the year. Everyone we met seemed to have something pickled or preserved for us to try. My favourite of the lot was definitely my boyfriend's aunt's raspberry preserves. After my much needed hammock nap at the barbecue, she brought me a little bowl of them made from raspberries she had picked in the mountains earlier this summer. They were incredible. (I suspect that the recipe my friend Oana posted here would make something just like them, if you could find yourself some wild raspberries.)

You know you're in Paris when...

...you can buy as many macarons from Ladurée, the pâtisserie where the first macarons were made (and where Pierre Hermé got his start), as your little heart desires...even at the airport! Sadly, we only stopped in Paris to change planes. 

Counting the days

When I asked my mother to teach me to cook a dish or two, she said it was not worth my time, that she had to do these things, I did not. This worked hard against me, not only when I found myself alone, but when I was a divorced father with a three-year-old daughter. Still, while I remained unable to cook for myself, Rachel and I in effect taught ourselves to do some cooking together--to cook for someone you care about is quite compatible with not wanting to take care of yourself--messy sometimes, but excellent ingredients and the best of intentions getting through. --Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know (p. 49) 

It seems as though the last thing I've had time to do this summer is cook. I certainly didn't plan things this way--July and August were going to be dedicated to leisurely trips to farmers' markets on the North Side and long afternoons of pastry-making and berry-eating. I'm not quite sure what's happened to this summer. It probably has something to do with the new apartment needing renovation and the school work from the spring I only finished just yesterday (hooray, now I'm actually on holiday). 

And now, while my boyfriend is attending a short but intense philosophy seminar with some very cool people in the Research Triangle, I'm in Chapel Hill, NC, without a thing to do but stroll around in the sun, stopping occasionally only to browse book collections or to eat with my constant dining companion, Stanley Cavell's autobiography, Little Did I Know. (Sadly, I don't have access to a kitchen. This chair at the Inn, however, is incredible. What possessed someone to mix green toile with intensely red walls and a checkered floor, I don't know.)

Between my visit to Auburn, Alabama earlier in the spring and my stay in Chapel Hill, I am developing a serious crush on the American South. There is something lovely about big, old trees and the hum of insects in the evening, about expansive porches and unsweetened iced tea, about having trees in the backyard heavy with summer fruit. I think I could live in a place like this.

On Saturday morning, a few of us walked into the neighbouring town of Carrboro to the farmers' market. (I am missing some of the best weeks of summer produce!) We came back to the hotel with potato-studded bread, a soft, barely ripened cheese from the Chapel Hill Creamery, two kinds of tomatoes, fresh Turkish figs, and half a lemon pound cake. We laid out our spread on one of the tables on the hotel porch (the hotel staff even obliged us with plates, napkins, and tea) and had ourselves a little picnic, while gushing about our favourite passages from Cavell's writings, of course.

But without a kitchen here, I'm just about ready to go home. I don't think I've gone quite this long without a home-cooked meal since my first year in undergrad on the mandatory meal plan. Not that I haven't had some great dining experiences here. Check out Lantern, if you ever find yourself in the area. The chef, Andrea Reusing, marries Asian flavours and techniques with traditional, locally sourced North Carolinian ingredients. The results are pretty spectacular. A few nights ago, I had a fantastic seafood hotpot chock-full of shrimp, halibut, squid, and mussels, all steeped in a wonderfully rich and lemony shrimp broth. The rest of the table split themselves between plates of whole fried flounder and pork chops. I think everyone was pretty pleased. 

Still, I'm counting the days until we're home. There will be lots of painting to do, but if I can just squeeze in a trip to the farmers' market, I know exactly what I'm going to share with you.

Notes from New York

In between writing papers and counting deer at the boyfriend's parents' place upstate, I've been eating my heart out in Manhattan. David Chang's noodles are everything they're cracked up to be. But it'll be the shrimp buns that I'll be back for. So good. They're what iceberg lettuce was made for.

Pictured above, the ever buttery, salty, and brilliant pretzel croissant. It's how I like to start my days in the city--breakfast of champions, I know. Below, a peek at Christina Tosi's crack pie™--pure buttery, sugary goodness, kind of like a butter tart but not so gooey. Yes, it's trademarked, and yes, it comes in a little cardboard box, just like a McDonald's apple pie, just, you know, a thousand times more awesome.

I promise to be back next week to talk about Lucky Peach and, if all goes well, a new batch of macarons.

Auburn

This past weekend, four of us, rather than buckling down and getting a good start on our term papers, jumped in the car and sped down winding Interstate 65, through flat Indiana and past the rugged, rusty ridges of Kentucky and Tennessee, to Auburn, Alabama. Primarily, we were there for a much anticipated conference on Wittgenstein's Tractatus (pictured above is the conference location, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, which houses a few Edvard Munch pieces and even more Audubons--a nice way to spend one's time between philosophy talks!). What really made the trip for me, however, was getting my first real glimpse at the American South and, at the same time, gaining a better sense of who one of my friends and fellow road-trippers is (he, having grown up in Alabama).

After the first day of the conference, we met up with his fiancee and a few old friends of his and had dinner at the Amsterdam Cafe. The dinner itself was great--I had my very first fried green tomatoes and a superb little taste of Gulf snapper. But it was our company that really made the night. Never have I met such people--so wonderfully warm, kind, earnest, reflective, and open from our first handshakes. Though they weren't philosophers by training--but artists, chemists, etc.--they welcomed my fumbling explanations of what it is that I do and what analytic philosophy is, more generally. And when we were done talking philosophy, we spoke of such things as bee-keeping in the city, community gardens, activism, Joel Salatin, guerilla gardening, and Ernest Hemingway. These are people I would have wanted to spend my undergraduate years talking to, late into the night and long after. I hope that we'll cross paths again.

Old friends, old favourites

Life after graduation is a strange time, it seems. More than a few of my friends from my undergrad days haven't quite found their places yet. Those who haven't gone back to school (for now) have largely flocked to Toronto, looking for a change of pace, for inspiration in deciding what to do next. And I feel for them. As we grew up, we were told to dream big, and so the nine-to-fives of our parents' generation seem like too little to settle for. We want to do things that we'll love, to do good for the world--but it's not very clear how we're to go about this or what we should do to be the best that we can be. We might have some sense of what the good life is in the abstract, but it's difficult to see what that comes down to here and now. There's virtue in doing whatever it is one ends up doing well, but that doesn't quite seem enough. What does it mean to live courageously in our world? Maybe we're just overprivileged, but there's still time to sort these things out...

...over splendid brunches at Aunties and Uncles...

...and undoubtedly the best cappuccinos in town.

Toronto and friends, you will be missed and thought of often.

A Pick-me-up

Some first bites are revelatory. You have to pause for a moment and contemplate as you chew, and when the bite is over, you sit back and sigh in bliss before going for the second. The best are unexpected, like the one a couple of nights ago on the way home. We were trudging through the dim, dreary streets on our way back to the centre of the city when a store-window display caught my eye--a golden tree made of macarons. We weren't really hungry, but I insisted that we stop for a quick bite.

We found ourselves in a bright, white cafe with rows of pretty confections on display--gin-and-tonic marshmallows, croissants, cakes, and macarons, of course. And beyond the cafe tables, a large glass window revealed a handful of kitchen staff, pastry bags in hand, piping away dedicatedly. The aesthetic was clinical, in a cute way, like a laboratory but for sweets.

We chose three macaron flavours to sample: salted butter caramel, mojito, and chestnut. Each was transcendent--delicate, generously filled, and deeply flavourful. It was difficult not to order a dozen more to take home. The mojito, especially, was incredible--it was minty, of course, but also surprising fresh  and not at all like toothpaste (always a danger with minty things, it seems). I will definitely be back, if only to sample the other flavours.

So if you find yourself dragging your feet along Queen St W in Toronto on a dreary day, stop in at Nadege Patisserie for a sweet little pick-me-up and a good cup of tea.

Oh yes, and Happy New Year.

Eating New York

In all seriousness: what does one do in New York City? I am lucky enough to be able to make trips twice a year, and just about every time that my boyfriend's parents pick us up from the train afterwards, they ask us what we did, and all that we can say is this: "We shopped a little, but mostly, we ate," and then offer them each a pretzel-croissant from City Bakery or whatever other tidbits we thought were worth toting home. And, of course, they just look at us quizzically, as though we should have gone to the MoMA or at least seen something on Broadway--we just spent the day in Manhattan, for crying out loud!

Call me a philistine if you'd like, but after a string of late nights writing on something like `Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', I would far rather sit down to a lovely lunch at Prune than brave the crowds at the MoMA. (Why is everyone who visits possessed by the urge to photograph the art? Do they plan on contemplating their pictures of it when they get home from their trips? I don't get it, and all of that jostling just makes me want to leave.) And lunch at Prune was lovely indeed. I really like the atmosphere there. It's a small place--probably seating no more than twenty--with a charming old bar, vintage mirrors lining the walls, penny tile on the floors, plenty of stools, tables, and cafe chairs salvaged from another life, and an open kitchen for the curious to peer into. It's a place with a sort of quiet, unassuming sophistication. And, the food, of course, was fantastic: skate wing in a brown butter-lemon sauce with capers, kale with parm and olive oil, poached pear in vanilla creme, and espresso mousse. So much so that there were actually leftovers from our much anticipated trip to Doughnut Plant, like the roasted chestnut doughnut pictured above. I assure you that it made for a well-balanced breakfast this morning.