Hunting Snarks and Inspiration
For those of you who at times follow my posts, you may know that I try to learn something new each day in our soul food kitchen. Without forcing the issue. Which can be a bit challenging at times. If, for example, I wake up with the notion of exploring how best to tease out the tanginess of rhubarb and there’s no rhubarb in our larder, that’s probably going to be a dead end.
There’s also the challenge of sourcing inspiration each day. Sometimes, it’s something that suddenly pops up in the local market, like immature green garlic or Brussels sprouts. or young okra. Sometimes, it’s a particular chef who’s caught my eye for the moment. And sometimes it’s a technique I’m obsessing over at any given moment, like the use of boiling water as a key component in various types of breadmaking.
It was the last example that was in my head recently, a technique I didn’t know much about at all until The New York Times did a feature piece on it, highlighting Nadiya Hussain, the recent “Great British Baking Show” winner. The featured recipe was a turmeric-infused pastry casing a lamb samosa. I already had fresh potatoes and frozen peas in stock, went for tofu in lieu of lamb, and we were off to the races.
The immediate cool take-aways from my morning tutorial had to do with the way in which boiling water interacts with flour to impede the glutenization process, making the dough unbelievably easy to work with. But the more interesting take-away for me here is the extent to which the daily hunt for inspiration constantly surprises. I had no idea what my test kitchen had in store for me this particular morning when I picked up the NYT. I rarely know where I’m headed at this early juncture in my day. And somehow, an hour later, I’m fucking around with gluten.
The Baker, as it turns out, in Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic poem referenced in my title above, rushes ahead of the hunting party, thinking he has found a Snark. But the Baker, however, mysteriously disappears. Leaving one to ponder ad infiitum the strange twists and turns of the journeys we undertake.
