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Good Eats: Dr. Strangeloaf
Bread is the staff of life and perhaps the ultimate comfort food. Its key ingredients are water, flour, yeast, salt and air, which seems simple enough. But proper technique is essential, and Alton aims to demonstrate that. He starts with how to pick the right ingredients, including the water! Yes, selecting the right kind of water is important. He continues by describing what yeast do for the cook and how to handle them correctly, and finishes by demonstrating the right way to knead and bake the dough. Follow his tips and your will fill your house with the intoxicating aroma of baking bread, and your stomach with... Good Eats. Alton shows how to make Very Basic Bread and how to customize the recipe to produce all sorts of variations.
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Episode Info
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Episode number: 8x19 Production Number: EA1H15 Airdate: Wednesday March 16th, 2005 Writer: Alton Brown
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Recap
Alton explains the wonders of bread, perhaps the ultimate comfort food. Bread is little more than flour, water, air and a little salt and yeast. Although many breads feature other ingredients these come and go at the whim of the baker. Yet like a lot of simple things, making bread properly takes the right ingredients and the right techniques...Read the full recap
Episode Notes
Cards
- Alton mentions lactobacillus sanfrancisco as part of the microflora responsible for the unique flavor of San Francisco sourdough bread. Scientists have since renamed this species Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
- A bakery in France claims to have been using the same (yeast) starter since the time of Napoleon.
- This rest, called “autolyse” allows the flour to hydrate and the gluten to relax. [ed: this card refers to the first rising of bread dough]
- If your dough doesn't rise on the "bench", then your yeast has "proven" it's a goner.
- Although professional bakers often use special razors for slashing, a serrated bread knife will do just fine.
Alton mentions lactobacillus sanfrancisco as part of the microflora responsible for the unique flavor of San Francisco sourdough bread. Scientists have since renamed this species Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
Locations: Harry’s Farmers Market (Marietta, GA)
Episode Quotes
Alton: Ahhh, fresh baked bread. Crusty on the outside, fragrant, yielding yet chewy on the inside, tangy, buttery, earthy... You know, I don’t care what those armies of carbophones chant – bread is the ultimate comfort food. Perhaps the ultimate food period. Admit it – right now you’re drooling like one of Pavlov’s pooches, aren’t you?
Alton: If you happen to find yourself armed with a few decent tools, some tried and true techniques, and a handful of carefully chosen groceries, you could soon be filling your home with the intoxicating aroma of freshly backed baked bread, and your tummy with seriously... (Good Eats theme plays)
Alton: Since it makes up about half of the average dough’s weight, water deserves careful consideration here. Now, municipal hydro is laced with chlorine, which kills microscopic organisms, right? That’s a good thing, most of the time, but we’re going to be baking with microscopic organisms – yeast – and we’d like to keep them alive until we’re ready for them not to be alive.
Alton: Yeast convert sugar into carbon dioxide, alcohol, acid, and a few dozen other compounds – in fact, that’s all yeast do, besides make little yeast. Asexually.
Yeast Puppets: What?!?
Alton: Sorry...
Yeast Puppets: What?!?
Alton: Sorry...
Alton: San Francisco sourdough starter isn’t famous just because it’s got a good marketing plan. It’s famous because lactobacillus sanfrancisco lives only in the Bay Area and has a very distinct flavor.
Alton: Carefully managed starters can last indefinitely – but – keeping up with one is a good bit of work. Kind of like having a pet that you raise and feed and take care of... and then bake and eat.
Alton: Centrifugal force – it’s a cruel mistress.
(Alton demonstrates how to tell when the kneading is done.)
Alton: Grab your dough and pull off just a little bitty ball like that and flatten it into a disc. When you get it flattened out, start kind of wiggling it to stretch in. The goal here is to see how thin a membrane we can make in the middle. The thinner the membrane without breaking, the better the gluten structure we have.
Alton: Grab your dough and pull off just a little bitty ball like that and flatten it into a disc. When you get it flattened out, start kind of wiggling it to stretch in. The goal here is to see how thin a membrane we can make in the middle. The thinner the membrane without breaking, the better the gluten structure we have.
(About the punchdown.)
Alton: Most beginning bakers think this process is about knocking bubbles out of the risen dough, but it isn’t – it’s about redistributing bubbles and new yeast cells.
Alton: Most beginning bakers think this process is about knocking bubbles out of the risen dough, but it isn’t – it’s about redistributing bubbles and new yeast cells.
Alton: When you let a formed piece like this rise, it’s called bench proofing. Although I’m not sure what it’s going to prove, exactly. I do know that if we put this piece in the oven now, it would be extremely dense and chewy. This is going to give us a light and fluffy texture.
Alton: I don’t know about you, but I like to have a nice crispy crust on my bread, and to ensure that I’m going to brush on a glaze composed of one third of a cup of water and a tablespoon of corn starch – shaken, not stirred.
Cultural References
The episode title Dr. Strangeloaf puns on the film "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" a movie by Stanley Kubrick starring Peter Sellers. The allusion is carried further by the full name of the episode, visible on the chalkboard: Dr. Strangeloaf, or, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bread".
After describing fresh bread, Alton suggests that his viewers might be drooling “like Pavlov’s pooches.” He’s referring to experiments conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among these were experiments demonstrating that dogs could learn to link a stimulus (a ringing bell) to an event (delivery of food) and would react to the stimulus as if the event had occurred, even when it did not: conditioned animals salivated when the bell rung, whether or not food was present. In Alton’s case, he’s assuming his detailed description of bread will evoke memories that will serve as the stimulus.
Returning from commercial, Alton prepares to drink a liquid from a flask as he says, “Finally, I’ll be as perky as Rachel...” At that point he notices that the viewers have returned, sets down the flask and resumes his narrative. No doubt the return from commercials interrupted some mad plan by which Alton intended to partially emulate another Food Network personality, Rachel Ray who is known for (among other things) her cheerfully perky approach to cooking. At the time this episode was recorded, Ray hosted several Food Network series. She has since ceased production on two of them and begun hosting a daytime talk produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.
Alton refers to a salt-less, unregulated dough as having the potential to become The Son of Blob. He may be referring to the 1958 science-fiction classic film The Blob that starred Steve McQueen and told the story of a protoplasmic alien invader and what happened when it landed in a small Pennsylvania town (nothing good). Or he might be referring to a 1972 comedic sequel Beware! The Blob, a wretched piece of work that is sometimes called Son of the Blob. The Blob was also remade in 1988. The eponymous Blob was an amorphous mass that grew out of control and overwhelmed whatever it attacked. Alton means to suggest that leaving salt out of bread dough will result in disaster!
Alton uses an animation, complete with a Sousa style march, to describe how kneading crosslinks gliadin and glutenin to produce gluten. This animation suggests those Terry Gilliam created for Monty Python's Flying Circus and various movies crafted by the British comedy troupe.
Alton uses the phrase “shaken, not stirred” when describing how to prepare a glaze that promotes crust formation. The phrase originally appeared in James Bond's famous vodka martini recipe.
Analysis
There’s a lot to know about baking bread properly, and Alton explains it all very clearly and concisely. The thorough scientific background provided in this episode demonstrates what happens at each stage of the bread making process, permitting cooks to understand (if they’re willing to think about it) what went wrong when they encounter failure, how to modify the recipe and what to expect when they try, and as a nice benefit, provides a basic bread recipe that’s easy and tasty. This combination of science and cooking remains Good Eats at its best.
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