Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America

A few years ago all the great bread was baked in France. In the United States artisan bread bakers were a rare breed. Now we can choose among potato bread and sourdough, whole-grain and semolina, pepper bread and bread flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, herbs and seeds.

All these breads are also appearing in boutique bakeries and in bountiful baskets, handed around to guests in restaurants.

Some chefs are baking their own signature breads and bread sticks as long as your arm and as skinny as a California waiter’s ponytail. Irresistibly, the appetite is seduced with a choice of grainy yellow cornbread, muffins, fresh from the oven.

On upscale tables, too, are feather-light, lily-white biscuits, sweet muffins with carrots and cranberries, or raisins and walnuts, along with hot scones flecked with melting morsels of white and dark chocolate. Soft focaccia, buttery brioches, crusty baguettes, crackling croissants, and hearty, healthy seven-grain breads.

Bread has become the icing on the cake.

There are surely many wonderfully satisfying culinary careers but being a bread baker rises to the top of the evolutionary ladder. Many professional culinary schools offer hands-on courses and many offer classes for hobbyists. There are even baking guilds to join such as The Bread Bakers Guild of America and bread baking competitive teams to root for.

Whole Grain Breads by Peter Reinhart

Among the best of the best bread cookbooks are Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor and The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville. The ever-reliable, fanatically-accurate Rose Levy Beranbaum compiled her recipes in The Bread Bible.

As an aside here, I published Rose Beranbaum’s first cookbook, Romantic and Classic Cakes. Her manuscript subsequently evolved into The Cake Bible. At the time, she asked me what I thought of the title.

I was horrified. I told her any religious person would be shocked! — shocked! at the idea of linking the Bible with a cake. Every nonreligious person wouldn’t even think of buying any book that had the word Bible in the title.

Once again this proves how often I am wrong!

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I can’t imagine a world without eggs. I have such happy memories of three eggs:

The first was a brown egg in an egg cup.  The top had been removed and inside was a miniature souffle.

The second egg was not an egg at all but was also nestled into an egg cup.

The chef had molded an outer part of white vanilla ice cream and inside, “the yoke” was a passion fruit sorbet.

The third egg was also a pretend one.  It was a “fried” egg in which the white was formed from white chocolate and “yolk” was an apricot mousse.

I can foresee the time when someone who throws an egg at a politician will be arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon

There is a precedent for everything.  There was another time, long ago when eating an omelet became a death sentence.  It happened in France, during the Revolution when the former President of the Consitutent Assembly was on the run.  Gripped by pangs of hunger, exhausted and scared, he threw caution to the wind and decided to stop at an inn for a meal.  Unwisely he asked the cook to make him a 12-egg omelet.  Times were bad then all over France, so it took no great genius to realize that this was the fugitive president.  The cooks  betrayed him and the mob hanged him.  Hence the dilhemma; you are hanged if you do and hand you are hanged if you don’t — eat eggs, that is.

As for eggy food jobs, how about these:

Barbara Dale-Avant, an employee of Atlantic Food Inc.’s cooked-egg division, in Hemingway, South Carolina, holds the record for number of hard-boiled eggs peeled per minute.  Her best total was 48, which means that she dawdled away exactly 1 1/4 seconds on each egg.  And her boss, Wilbur Ivey, is not a man to tolerate bits of shell among the eggs, which are shipped to East Coast restaurants.  To get these perfect results, he is willing to allow 3 seconds per egg, but that’s only when peelers are first starting to peel on the job.

“A real clumsy person couldn’t do this,” remarked one of Avant’s peelers, somewhat unnecessarily.  Another confided that the members of the six-woman team (who together once peeled 10,000 eggs in an eight-hour shift,) sometimes throw eggs at each other, recreationally, although Mr. Ivey does not entirely approve.  On the other hand, he is clearly no spoilsport, as he is credited with devising the initiation rite for new egg-peeler: he slips a raw egg into a recruit’s first batch.

Howard Hillman made omelettes.  He made omelettes at conventions, at parties, and wherever two or three or many more people were gathered together all over the country.  There was a time when Howard Hillman was making omelettes everywhere you went.  He made tomato and cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes, banana and nut omelettes, omelettes of every kind, large and small, with or without crowd participation.  Howard Hillman became the Omelette Emperor of the Western Hemisphere.  He had a skill that many others possess. The difference between Howard Hillman and everyone else is that he took his talent and marketed the dickens out of  his talent.

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Every few weeks I’m invited to speak to the newly arriving students at culinary school. I tell them I teach a class on love affairs.

I am the matchmaker.

I want to know what each student loves (not what he or she likes) to do.

With a little bit of luck, I can suggest ways in which they can marry their hobby or unique skills with their culinary knowledge as they seek a long and fruitful career.

I’m astonished to discover how many budding chefs yearn to own a truck. A truck that serves every kind of food from cupcakes and rice pudding to Korean barbecue.

Today I talked about the calendar. The US Tennis Open is coming up. So is the World Series. A sports fan may want to cook at the private dining room of a sports franchise or become a private chef for an athlete.

Dancing with the Stars employs a personal chef for each competition. Personal chef jobs are on the rise. It is one of the best jobs for an entrepreneur who can start a business without requiring a capital investment.

I spoke about jobs in art and design; photographer, food stylist, kitchen designer, and special event cake designer. Create a wedding cake in oil and acrylic paint to frame and preserve for ever and ever (or as long as the marriage lasts.) become a chef in a museum, create a food exhibit, become a lecturer on the topic of food in fine art? Become a recipe developer for Panera or Starbucks (or Dunkin D’s.)

Tasting is a good and well paying job. Taste ice cream, coffee, tea, olive oil. Chew gum. No kidding. Nestle is one of the companies that employs chewing gum tasters. There are real jobs that require super taster to… well…taste…all day. .

How about becoming an ethicist, a futurist or a trend tracker?

Or work on Wall Street analyzing food companies?

Or work for a food foundation or as a humanitarian or lobbyist or inspector to trace the source of contaminated food.

Here are just a few ideas for working in the food media: investigative journalist, vegetarian columnist, historian, folklorist (why do so many Jews go out for Chinese dinner on Sundays?)  The late Professor Alan Dundes examined this question with his students who also study the allure of violent sports, holiday traditions and even the mystique of the vampire.

Said Dundes: “As a psychoanalytic folklorist, my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational and seek to make the unconscious conscious.”

How about taking up a career as a food memoir writer, biographer, commentator, geographer (do you know what a food geographer does?) trade magazine reporter, supermarket observer, radio host, (I’d like this job myself,) essayist, restaurant reviewer, food book reviewer (not only cookbooks but also food books dealing with politics, profiles of food companies etc.), catalog writer, TV star, ingredient shopper for TV star, TV producer, obituary writer for former food celebrities. Preparer of last meals in the federal penitentiary leading to a possible book contract for Meals to Die For.

I had only three minutes to describe my food jobs class so I didn’t have time to even mention careers in education, farming, science and technology or rare, unusual and extraordinary culinary careers so instead, I’ll get around to them in this blog. Please come back soon.

And.

Have a nice day (as they say at the bank!)

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