is just a baguette.
I enjoy baking. It's challenging and rewarding, but it isn't cooking. The palette available to me as a chef was well over a thousand ingredients, from the elegant and sublime to the pedestrian. I always prided myself in being able to make something extraordinary from ordinary fare; the price of an ingredient never had any bearing on whether or not I used it. So it didn't matter whether I used foie gras simply to thicken a sauce, or if I used fresh herbs from the garden in summer squash Provencal.
Baking, on the other hand, is essentially flour, water, yeast, and salt. Oh, sure, it might get dairy, or some produce, or require days of fermentation or very delicate manipulation, but it isn't tuna threaded with pickled ginger on a bed of leeks stir-fried in walnut oil with salt-cured lime, celeriac and butter emulsion and sauteed bitter greens.
Cutting up mirepoix and gathering herbs for a pot of stock is infinitely more rewarding to me than making a good croissant.
Oh, well, I guess it's too late to do anything about it now.
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I'm shocked that someone has stumbled across my blog. Thank you for your kind words. Not sure when it was, as I check it most infrequently. I enjoyed your entries immensely as well. I work in a supermarket artisan bakery, it sounds as though you're in a position where there's more room for experimentation. I will check out the "Breads of the LaBrea Bakery." I've been trying to work up the courage to attempt the whole wheat and nothing but the whole wheat breads in Peter Reinhart's current book. Thanks again and I'll steal Peter's line because it's so great "May your bread always rise."
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