I’ve had better.  Twice.

My first, best stove was a vintage, four-burner gas with a chrome griddle, two ovens and a broiler.  The top shelf folded down to cover the burners in sleek white enamel with a few character-inducing chips.  Vin T., I called him.  His stove innards were that deep cobalt porcelain with the white speckles.  So what if he had to be cleaned by hand?  I was twenty-three years old and thought I knew everything.  Decades later, I realize that Vin T. came into my life thanks to my mother’s fearlessness.  She found him for me at a used appliance store in the heart of Santa Ana, California, back when gangs were new and terrifying and women didn’t go such places alone.

Imagine her: five-foot nothing, ninety pounds, walking around the appliance corral and choosing Vin T.  Until recently, her world had been easy.  She had just moved into the custom built home she and my dad planned and worked toward for years.   But only two years later, he suddenly died of a heart attack.  He wasn’t even fifty.  Of all the things my mother could have been doing, she chose to venture out and find me a vintage stove.  I learned to cook on Vin T.  Bread never failed to rise in his always-warm oven thanks to his pilot light.

Pilot light:  a metaphor lost to history, thanks to the Energy Star appliances we’re encouraged to buy.  But there’s something about it I miss.  Like an ember in the woodstove, banked against the cold.  The tiniest stoke brings back fire, and fire is life, comfort, and a necessity.

We foolishly left Vin T. with the first house we owned when we moved to the ranch style tract home we’d live in for twenty-five years.  When the first house fell out of escrow, I suggested we go back and steal Vin T., but by then I had a new stove, and I talked myself into believing it was a better deal all around.  Over the years I’ve thought about Vin T. many times.  He was the Appaloosa horse of stoves, sturdy and uncomplaining.  I hope he’s still making somebody Sunday pancakes.

The cookers between Vintage and the Viking don’t bear remarking upon other than to say if we can make Mercedes automobiles and Volkswagens live forever, what is up with our cheap, ugly appliances?  Look at the gorgeous Aga cookers in the U.K.  Why America doesn’t make beautiful, curvy stoves I cannot figure.

Onto the Viking: my dream stove.  Vi King was the jewel of my newly renovated kitchen.  Stainless steel, with a matching hood.  A fan that sensed heat and turned on automatically.  Four, easy-to-clean, lift-out burners.  A switch for convection and regular gas heating.  A perfectly designed pullout tray that caught all the crumbs.  When I set Vi King to 400, she heated up in less than five minutes.  She delivered crusty bread, butter-seared halibut cheeks and far too many brownies than a middle-aged person should consume over eight Alaskan winters.  My only lament is that I was working so much that I didn’t have time to try everything Vi King was capable of cooking.  When we got ready to move back to the lower Forty-eight, I experienced that same sort of pang as I did for Vin T.  But Vi King was a behemoth, too heavy to move, and the buyers of our house were already in love with her, as well they should be.

“We’ll buy something just as great when we settle in New Mexico,” my husband promised.

To be continued…

It’s almost anti-climactic.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with this experiment, I built a pâte fermentée starter, also known as “old dough,” which doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.  I started from scratch, using only organic whole wheat flour and water…no commercial yeast.  The only yeasts involved are the natural yeasts in our good old New Mexico air and the ones that live on the wheat berries themselves.

The term “old dough” describes the way bread was made for ages uncounted before fresh yeast cakes or packets of dried yeast became widely available at the grocery store.  The way most people leavened their bread was by keeping back a piece of dough from each batch to jump start the next batch.  These starters were often handed down from mother to daughter.

But, of course, somebody had to have made that first starter.  Which is what I wanted to try.  And I finally succeeded.  From starter to dough to bread in 6½ days.  Good thing I’m not a pioneer woman, depending on this bread to feed my family.  Our bones would be bleaching on the prairie by now.

The loaves are smaller than I expected, which may be partly due to the cold weather–about 7″ in diameter and 3½” high.  I proofed them on flat sheets instead of in bannetons or bowls, so they were pretty flat before I put them in the oven.  But they’re attractive (I think) and delicious–moist and chewy crumb with a nutty grain flavor, thick, crisp/chewy crust.  They make fabulous toast.

So now I’m thinking…pain à l’ancienne baguettes like Phillipe Gosselin makes in Paris.  Or maybe a semolina bread such as Pane Siciliano, a traditional S-shaped bread from Sicily.  Or olive cheeks, adorable little rolls from Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads by way of my friend Susan Thomas’s incredible food blog, Farmgirl Fare.

That’s the amazing thing…so many breads, so little time.  And if you ever think you’ve finally got it all figured out, something new–a technique or a book or kind of bread you never even heard of–comes along and you just have to try it.  Not to mention quick breads…muffins and scones, biscuits, flatbreads…don’t get me started.

The good news: my starter has started!  See photo, left.

The bad news: So has the other starter I started when the first one didn’t start.

I know it sounds confusing, but when my natural levain was just sitting around getting chilblains, I got bored.  I figured it would be two or three more days before I’d be able to do anything with it.  So I made a poolish for a whole wheat bread with lemon, honey and poppyseeds.  This recipe came from Daniel Leader’s seminal work, Bread Alone.  Catchy title, eh?

The poolish method of bread making has been around for a long time.  I remember my gramma using it, only she called it a sponge, which doesn’t sound particularly appetizing.  It involves making a starter from a small portion of the total ingredients–in this case it was ¾ cup of water, 1 ¼ cup of flour, and ½ teaspoon dry yeast.  You mix that together and let it ferment anywhere from 2-10 hours and then use it as a base for your bread dough.  You get some of the advantages of a natural starter–kick-started yeast, enhanced taste, texture, and keeping ability, for instance–without having to wait five days for the starter to get ready.  Here’s how the whole wheat bread turned out.

But then, suddenly everything got ready at the exact same time.  So I had to make the dough for the whole wheat bread and then hurry up and do the next addition to the all natural levain.  My Heat & Heal pillow worked great.  You nuke it in the microwave for 3-4 minutes and then for the next 45 minutes to an hour, it radiates a lovely moist warmth.  It’s big enough to drape around aching shoulders, neck and other body parts.  And now I’m going to have to call my friend Jo Ellen Thompson, who makes them, and tell her I’ve discovered a whole new market for her creations.

We live in a 1949 Stamm house in Santa Fe (Stamm being the builder, who became somewhat of a legend in this town.)  Unfortunately, postwar builders apparently weren’t too eco-savvy, or maybe heating was cheaper then.  So, while I love my house, I usually spend the winter wearing long underwear and my heavy-duty fleece hoodie.

The warmest room in the house is the master bath (probably because of the room’s size relative to the heat vent) so it’s never a surprise to walk in and find the dog asleep on the rug, wet clothes drying, butter softening, or bread dough rising.  Which brings me to the subject of this post.

I’m making–or trying to make–a natural levain or starter from scratch.  No commercial yeast.  We have so many great bakeries in Santa Fe that finding great bread is never a problem.  Someone asked me the other day why I bothered to spend five days building a starter, then another two making country French bread.

Answer: Because it’s fun.  And because I can.

Well, this person continued, what about the (old) new, no-knead bread baking methods that are all over the internet now, where you simply mix flour water, yeast and salt, let it sit for 18 hours and bake it off.  Presto…instant artisan bread.

Answer: The words “instant” and “artisan” don’t belong in the same sentence.

Yes, I’ve tried that method.  Beginning in 1999 when Suzanne Dunaway’s book, No Need to Knead, was published.  I’ve also tried Kneadlessly Simple by Nancy Baggett and My Bread by Jim Lahey and Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg.  They all make good bread.  Very good bread, actually.  But not the best, in my opinion.  I find the texture leaves something to be desired, not to mention the depth of flavor.  And really, now, what’s the big fuss about kneading?  Ten minutes by hand, six to twelve minutes when my tendonitis is kicking up and I have to resort to the KitchenAid.  To me, having my hands in dough is the most pleasurable part–other than eating the bread, of course.

Right now it’s cold outside and we’re getting our first real snow of the winter.  I like being in the kitchen, and it doesn’t take but 15 or 20 minutes more with the kneading and shaping than it would with the no-knead method.  So I decided to try one of the “formulas” from Peter Reinhart’s Crust and Crumb.  Peter is one of my bread heroes… ever since I read Brother Juniper’s Bread Book back in 1991.

I’m an intuitive baker, but I accept the fact that baking is somewhat of a science and, particularly when making a starter, a formula comes in handy.  Although, having said that, I realized yesterday morning (Day 2) that here at 7000 feet, high and dry, the 1/3 cup water called for just wasn’t enough to hydrate the fairly dry seed from yesterday plus another 4.5 oz of bread flour.  So I ended up adding another few tablespoons of water.

The second day refreshment was done, although it hadn’t risen much, if at all.  According to Peter, that wasn’t a problem.  It was a problem, however, that by this morning (Day 3) it still hadn’t budged.  And the formula says not to move on to the next step until the starter has doubled in size.  Of course, it didn’t help that we had a power failure during the night and the house, even the bathroom, had the approximate ambient temperature of a meat locker when we got up this morning.

So right now my starter is cosseted in the microwave with my Heat & Heal pillow, which I nuked for four minutes and which is now radiating a lovely warmth.  I feel like I should put a little knit hat and scarf on my poor, chilly starter.  Hopefully, as the dough warms up, those little wild yeasts will get active.  We’ll see.  Stay tuned…