This is a bread we made in class (way back in the halcyon bread days, before butter and sugar commandeered my educational life).

I modified the formula to use liquid instead of stiff levain. I removed the small amount of instant yeast, and increased the fermentation and proof times accordingly. I used a different seed mixture and slightly increased the amount of whole grain flour. I added an autolyse (rest period after fours are mixed with water and starter).

So is this the same bread we made in class? Here I turn to G. W. F. Hegel, who said, “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.” That clears things up nicely, doesn’t it?

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On a Friday night in late January, when most normal baking students might be relaxing and recovering from a hard week of cakes, buttercreams, meringues, and more cakes with a nice dinner, a bottle of wine, and maybe a movie, I had something else in mind. I caramelized eight bulbs of fennel,

and toasted more pine nuts and fennel seed than I’ll use all at once ever again. I fed my starter, building it up to over one kilogram, and called it a night.

On Saturday morning, I was back at school bright and early, adding my carefully-prepared elements to the mixer along with exactly the right amount of flour, semolina flour, olive oil, water, and dried currants to make 7.1 kilograms of bejeweled and fragrant dough.

Three hours or so later, I shaped the bejeweled, fragrant, and now very lively, fermented dough into fourteen pointy batards, tucked them snugly into their linen beds, and bid them a chilly good night at 46F.

I wondered nervously if these pointy batards could be trusted to settle down to a long, slow proof like they were supposed to. Would I return early Sunday morning to find them plump and energized from a peaceful nap, or would they be spent and deflated after a night of wild yeast partying with the loaves of six of my classmates in that unchaperoned retarder? And would they bake up into the deeply-colored, crusty-outside-soft-inside, savory-sweet loaves that I envisioned, or fall flat under the pressure?

The short answer is that when I pulled these loaves  out of the oven at 7:30 a.m., I was very happy, and satisfied that I was ready for battle in the form of SF Food Wars: Yeast Affliction!

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For Christmas Eve dinner I made chili and corn bread. Because we were ten people and I thought to save a little time on after-dinner clean-up, I made sourdough corn bread bowls to hold the chili. I mixed the dough at about 7 a.m. and the bowls were baked, cooled, and hollowed out just in time for dinner at 6 p.m. Uh huh, it was such a time-saver over washing ten dishes.

OK, so I may not win the Ms. Efficiency title this year, but everyone said these bowls were good. So good, in fact, that they ate them before going back for seconds on the chili, so we still ended up with a bunch of dishes to wash. But isn’t that, after all, what the holidays are about — baking and cleaning?

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