I’ve been watching The Mind of a Chef a lot lately, and am totally entranced by the baking genius of Christina Tosi (of Momofuku Milk Bar). Watching her make corn cookies is almost enough to make me want to enroll in culinary school. Corn isn’t really an ingredient I think of when I think of cookies, but considering the sweetness of fresh corn and its long-standing association with a healthy pat of butter on the cob, it makes a lot of sense. I guess that’s the essence of innovation in food, when it comes down to it — creating something so new, so unexpected that people are surprised — but when you think about it, you wonder why it didn’t exist all along.

Corn was also the bassline of my bread this week, the first alphabetically in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. When I was a kid we used to go to the farmers’ market to buy loaves of “squaw bread,” which was dark and sweet and grainy and delicious by itself and for a sandwich. Anadama reminds me a lot of that bread — it’s lightly sweet, with a texture that just screams “please spread something on me!” …In the most PG way possible. The sweetness of the bread comes from an overnight cornmeal “soaker” and a few tablespoons of molasses, a fun ingredient that looks super cool as it rolls down the mini mountains of flour in a bowl.
I’ve made a lot of grainy breads in the past, and one problem I almost always run into is a soft, lifeless crust, or lack thereof. This is probably related to my subpar kneading time (windowpane test strikes again!), so this time I tried to knead the dough to a much stretchier consistency than I usually do. Maybe it has to do with the relative heat wave we were experiencing this week, or the sugar in the corn that had been soaking for 12+ hours by the time I added the yeast, but this dough rose super well. It was a three stage building process to make the dough (soaker >> sponge >> finished dough), so maybe that also helped.

Anadama is usually a pan bread, which is a little easier to handle because you just plop it in the pan and let it rise until you stick it in the oven. It also gives a nice, sandwich-ready shape to the loaf, so the end result pretty versatile. I ate it mostly with peanut butter and honey. Even after a good soaking, the cornmeal gave this bread a nice texture without being gritty– I’d definitely add this bread to my weekly baking lineup.

This Week’s Lesson

Learn to think of old ingredients in new ways — and post weekly blogposts in a more timely manner.