So. I wanted to try to make a chic crouton. Where to begin? My favorite type of bread is Pumpernickel, with light rye being second. I can buy the latter down here, but not the former, so before I could even consider making a pumpernickel crouton, I had to figure out how to make pumpernickel bread.<\/p>\n
It took me about 7 attempts before I got a loaf that I considered good. My first few failed miserably, my next ones were ok but pretty boring. So I tried taking the boring ones and remaking them, adding dashes of random ingredients (one loaf saw me dump a tablespoon of Ranch popcorn seasoning into it. SHUT UP. This made sense in my head: crouton, salad, ranch dressing. I thought “Oh man, Grant Achatz is totally going to read this and think I AM A GENIUS and invite me for a free meal and offer to pay for my ticket from New Zealand because of my clever thinking”. The loaf didn’t even attempt to rise and smelled AWFUL). I was venting my frustration one day to my friend Kevin, who loaned me a cookbook<\/a> that totally turned me around. This book is seriously awesome, guys. It had chapters on chapters about breadmaking, the science involved, every little detail carefully explained. Using it I made a pair of loaves that were what I’d say every bit of what I wanted (incidentally, what I wanted was that bread Outback Steakhouse serves with butter. That shit is AWESOME).<\/p>\n Having been able to successfully bake a loaf of bread, I tried to think up ways that I could present the crouton. More than anything I wanted to make it into a serving dish of some sort. I tried all sorts of things…smearing dough onto the back of a bowl and baking it, wetting baked bread and trying to mold it into a shape, building various architectural pieces that I tried to assemble after toasting the croutons.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. In this case, I couldn’t come up with anything clever. Also toasting pumpernickel too much singes the molasses it contains, which made it taste not so great anyway.<\/p>\n Another direction I went was playing with the greens and salad toppings. One of my favorite restaurants in Wellington is Moyses Taverna, a greek place that serves cabbage and mint salad with oil and lemon juice. It’s simple and delicious, and lends itself to being presented in this form. I also made some of Thomas Keller’s amazing basic vinagrette I mentioned last time; this turned out pretty ok, but our crappy fridge’s freezer hovers just below 0, so it doesn’t have the muscle to freeze vinegar well. I ended up with something closer to vinaigrette sludge, which still tastes great.<\/p>\n In the end though, all I really managed to do was freeze some different types of liquids, which is hardly laudable or interesting I think, so I’m considering this particular endeavour subpar. The silver lining was definitely the breadmaking experience.<\/p>\n Pressing on!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apologies for the downtime here; I’ve been a bit mired in details. When we last tuned in on our hero, he had made a reasonably simple dish of frozen lettuce…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-56","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/2009_05_24_alinea_1663.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwfL0-U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5200,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/5200"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"2009_05_24_alinea_1663\"](\"https:\/\/www.allenhemberger.com\/alinea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/2009_05_24_alinea_1663.jpg\" "\\"2009_05_24_alinea_1663\\"")
<\/p>\n