Columbus Culinary Observation Paper for Composition

From my brain

Already in the Orthodox Church, we’re beginning our road toward Great Lent. Here in school, we’re in the middle of our breads and pastries schedule. When the assignment of an observational paper was presented, suggesting we find something we care about as the subject, one thing immediately came to mind: my Sicilian Easter bread. I’ve been looking forward to this term in the schedule for a long time, and now that it’s here, sharing one of my favorite – not to mention time intensive – breads seems appropriate.

Recently, Chef Ginsberg mentioned that “Bakers really aren’t true culinarians.” {Note here that I had completely misheard her statement, and she said that bakers and culinarians are different; culinarians can do "pinch of this or that", but you can't play around as easily with baking that way; it's too exacting.} I don’t know if she was being facetious, but that sentiment often emanates from my fellow students. Most people “like” bread, but I truly have a hunger to learn everything about it. The smell of yeast blooming in a bowl intoxicates me. I’m mystified by the chemical processes occurring in the mass of dough as it ferments up. Shaping a loaf of bread for the oven makes me feel like a sculptor with a block of granite before him, knowing that there is this wonderful creation inside. Yes, that’s a bit melodramatic, but I’m completely enamored with bread.

My basic white bread, olive oil bread, and even my rosemary-raisin breads are almost simplistic, but my “Easter Bread” is an entity all to itself. I found the original recipe in Don Baratta’s The Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook as “Sicilian Easter Ring.” As the title suggests, his bread is formed into a ring. However, when I make it for our basket for the Paschal (Easter) service, I form it into a cross. His bread was formed by making a braid of three strands of dough. I form two sets of three strands – with one set slightly smaller – as it forms the horizontal part of the cross.

What sets this apart from most of my breads is that it’s rich. Really, really rich. A fair amount of eggs, lots of butter, and likewise a lot of sugar (there is also a hint of lemon zest for added flavor). It’s definitely not simple white bread, and you’re not going to make a PB&J out of it, but it makes a fantastic ham sandwich. Often, people are leery of just cutting into it, namely because it’s a cross; beautiful to display, but is it sacrilegious to eat? One other feature to note is that at each point in the cross is a bright red hard-boiled Easter egg. (In the original recipe, the four eggs were just equidistant around the ring.) The eggs are boiled ahead of time, dyed, and then inserted into the braids at baking time.

The first time I had prepared this bread, I was completely clueless. Up until then, I had only done basic breads consisting of flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe a little sugar. Mix it in a bowl or stand mixer and let it rise. This monstrosity took some prep work and some new skills, namely creaming butter. Butter is beaten in the mixer with a paddle attachment until light and airy. After scraping down the bowl several times, sugar is added, which produces more volume. That initial batch of dough was like a science experiment where I kept looking back into the book and asking it, “OK, now what? Am I doing it right?” Occasionally, I’d call my wife in to take a look and see if this creaming thing was going OK. She offered a few points of encouragement (being familiar with this step, having made cakes and pies for years), and then left me to plod along alone in the kitchen.

I still sometimes wonder what my future life as a baker will be like. It may come as a surprise to people who know me as being a bit wild and fun in class, but I’m a social hermit for the most part. What will that isolation be like in the wee hours of the morning when most people are sound asleep? Most of the chefs around school (as far as I know) were “real cooks” and none of them strictly bread bakers, so I don’t have much at-hand advice to work from. It does give me pause to wonder how very different my life ahead of me will be.

While the previous paragraph was a bit of a scenic detour, I’ll get back to the Easter bread. I’ve had to tweak the recipe slightly each time I’ve made it, trying to improve on the previous batch’s experience. For one thing, the original recipe had entirely too much lemon zest for my family’s taste. No one (except me) likes the “I am Lemon!” roar that it produces, so I’ve learned to cut it back to half of the original. Likewise, they liked it a bit sweeter, so I’ve added more sugar. The hard-boiled eggs also take a bit of finesse, as you have to “varnish” them with repeated washes of egg whites (dye eggs, dry thoroughly, varnish, dry in low-temp oven, varnish, dry, varnish, dry, etc.). Without doing this, they “bleed” all over the finished dough and give an odd look to the finished product.

I enjoy the bread because it has a uniqueness and familiarity to it. It reminds my wife of her mother’s bread in texture, but not quite in flavor. For my mother and me, it bears a resemblance to Polish “Plack” (plaht-sek) in flavor, but nowhere close to the texture. Now that I’ve been going to school, it also makes sense how some have compared it to challah (especially due to the richness and braiding), but also to brioche (due to the wispy texture inside). Oddly enough, while my father’s side of the family is 100% Sicilian (he came off the boat in 1965 when he was only 15), Nana never made any bread remotely like this. As I had always admired my grandmother’s baking skills, I once sent her a ring version of it. It made me quite proud when she said she really liked it.

I first picked up The Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook when I was researching new breads to use for my home bread business. I worked second shift at the office, and would bake bread in the early morning and afternoon, delivering the loaves to my coworkers at the start of my shift. The bread was a big hit back then (as most of my breads were), and it always put a smile on my face to see my customer/co-workers grin when I delivered hot, fresh bread to their desks. Culinary school was just a dream then, as I knew I couldn’t do school and work full time, nor could I quit a job making the kind of money I was making. Eventually, “inappropriate use of the company’s email systems” in sending out my menu broke my main marketing tool, and I lost heart in the business. I only rarely baked bread even for my family for years afterward, but at Easter time, I always made it a point to make the special bread.

In February of 2009, I developed pains in my right abdomen. After the original diagnosis of kidney stones “passed”, the pain remained for weeks on end. As my doctor and I worked out the final paperwork for my FMLA, my employer threw a curveball at me: “Due to the recent economic downturn, your job has been eliminated.” That was the quote given to me by my boss, over the phone, while I was barely-lucid due to painkillers. It was Good Friday. I spent most of Friday in shock of it all, but resolved that evening to put the loss of fourteen years of employment to the side. It was Pascha – Easter – and it was Holy Saturday tomorrow. Focus on Pascha, and never mind everything else.

Holy Saturday I had one thing planned: Easter bread. While my wife attended a baptismal service in the early afternoon, I began to make the bread. Until that day, I had forgotten just how much I missed the smell of yeast in the air. I smiled a lot. I didn’t wallow in pity…I just enjoyed making the bread. That evening, following midnight service, I couldn’t sleep. Pascha was here, and my mind thought: “Now what? What are we going to do?” One thing only popped into my head: “What’s stopping you from going culinary school now?” So it was, there, on Easter morning, at 4 a.m., I found myself in front of my computer, and I keyed information to this “Columbus Culinary Institute” school to take a chance on a new life.