An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory

For those of you who have difficulty recognizing this not in the original French, it is a quotation from À la recherche du temps perdu, (known in English translation as In Search of Lost Time (which sounds a bit like a Rider Haggard novel) or, more poetically, as Remembrance of Things Past (which, I have only just discovered, is a quotation from Skespeare’s Sonnet XXX). DON’T PANIC! THIS IS GUARANTEED TO BE THE ONLY MENTION OF THE S-WORD IN THIS WEEK’S POST.  We’re kicking off with a dollop of Proust today because I wanted to tell you about my own recherche for a particular temps perdu.

Just to refresh your memory, the passage above captures a moment of what Proust calls involuntary memory, in this case a moment when, biting into a madeleine (a shell-shaped small sponge cake), he remembers, in his childhood, being given a taste of his aunt’s madeleine dipped in tea every Sunday morning. The sight of the madeleine had evoked no memories, but the very first taste transports him instantly back.

Our story today actually begins deep in the countryside of rural West England (if my memory serves me correctly), in August 1965. I am, for the first time, a madrich (group leader) at Hanoar Hatzioni Zionist Youth summer camp, and it is Open Day (traditionally, the middle Sunday of camp). My parents, of course, are not there: my father has a kosher delicatessen and grocery store, and Sunday (his half-day!) begins around 5AM and ends around 3PM. However, the parents of one of my friends from Ilford are there, and they come over to me with a bulging brown paper bag. Inside, lovingly and individually wrapped in aluminium foil, are a dozen perfect, smooth, glossy baigels (which you can spell and pronounce any way you like, but, if you come from East London, they are spelt ‘bai…’ and pronounced ‘buy’), cut, buttered, and spread with the best smoked salmon in London. (Among his many skills, my father was a master slicer of smoked salmon. When we buy smoked salmon from the supermarket here, and I open the packet and see the great thick wedges of fish, I want to cry!) In a separate plastic bag are half-a-dozen smallish pickled cucumbers (pickled in a style we called new green). I like to flatter myself that my popularity at camp was due to my (then) sunny personality, quick wit and boyish charm; however, in all honesty, I was never more popular than on that day and on subsequent Open Days.

I have always been a sucker for a smoked salmon baigel. Of course, I had no idea, growing up, that smoked salmon was a luxury. In our household, smoked salmon was what was always there when there was nothing else in the fridge. Anyway (and here we start to approach my subject this week), one of the very, very few things that I miss in Israel is, ridiculously, the Jewish breads I grew up with. In additional to baigels, this includes platzels (which are almost – but not quite – identical to what are known in Israel as bagels), brown bread – or, more accurately – bra-a-hn bread (by which I mean, confusingly, rye bread with carraway seeds), and, to a lesser extent, black bread (which I suspect is identical to some breeds of pumpernickel).

And so, when I started baking my own bread, I set myself the challenge of finding recipes for, and reproducing, the baigels and platzels and brown bread of my youth. It was, I must confess, a long journey, including a number of blind alleys. I learnt the mysteries of lye, which some recipes recommend as the way to achieve the crisp crust of the baigel. However, I tend to be a little put off by any food recipe that includes the instruction: Now put on your goggles and protective gloves, and that points out that if you don’t boil in a stainless steel pot, the lye may react to create a poison. After several disappointments, and one or two very near misses, I found a recipe from Les Saidel, which made my hopes rise, and I was not disappointed.

A word about Les Saidel. I believe he is a biochemist by profession, but, having come on aliya from South Africa, he decided to pursue his passion for baking, ordered a brick oven from overseas, and opened an artisan bakery. His first serious venture was Rambam bread, using ingredients and techniques recommended by the Medieval Jewish scholar Rambam (Maimonides), who was also a physician and polymath, and who understood the importance of a healthy, balanced diet. Over the years, Saidel has expanded his business and now offers a range of hands-on workshops geared for the whole family, including Breads of the Temple, French bread, and Italian bread and pasta baking. His enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject are boundless, and the vast majority of the bread I bake is from his recipes.

To cut to the chase: the first time I followed Saidel’s recipe for platzels, I knew that I had struck gold. Over the next couple of months, some tweaking of the ratio of bread flour to whole grain flour brought me to the point where I felt I had recreated the texture and flavour I grew up with.

Using the same dough, but boiling in water, and baking for slightly longer, produced the baigels that I was looking for, which only left rye bread.

I must have tried seven or eight recipes, one of which was very tasty; but none was Proustian or madeleinish enough. Finally, in his occasional column in The Jerusalem Post, Saidel published a recipe for rye bread with caraway seeds. On the first baking, this hit the bulls eye. I was a happy man.

And then, as tends to happen, the seasons changed. Fortunately, by this time I had a sense of the correct consistency for the dough, so I was able to adjust the mixture, adding a little water or a little flour as needed, and shortening or lengthening the rising time, depending on how close our kitchen was to the old-fashioned airing cupboard where the immersion heater lived.  Of course, this sometimes means adding a little too much flour, followed by just a little too much water to compensate, and so on in a process that is almost the exact opposite of trying to even up a table by sawing a little off one of the legs.

Last week, I must confess, things went horribly wrong. We are currently in the grip of a horrendous heatwave; Jerusalem recorded its highest temperature since records began 78 years ago. I failed to make sufficient adjustment for that, and ended with a baigel dough that was too dry. This had two results. I roll the baigel dough into a shortish cylinder, then fold it over my palm and seal the two ends together. However, on this occasion, the dough was too dry to make a strong enough seal; in the boiling water, most of my baigels came unstuck. In addition, the dry dough puckered and rucked in the boiling water.

I am still hunting for the perfect black bread. I have read that some pumpernickels use flour made from spent grains; these are the grains that are used in beer-making, the first stage of which involves putting grain in a muslin bag and immersing it in water heated to 70^o C for 20 minutes. After that time, you remove the grains, drain them, and either feed them to your chickens (of which we have none now, and, even when we did have, we bought them dead, plucked, gutted and with their legs in the air), or put them in your compost-bin (which we don’t have), or dump in the rubbish. I always do that, but it seems a shame, and, when I read that you can bake with flour ground from spent grain, I was very excited. I then spent 15 minutes squeezing all moisture of the grain, two hours drying it in a very low oven, raking it every 20 minutes, and then another half-an-hour grinding it in the food processor (since we don’t have a coffee grinder or flour mill) until it reached a point where I was able to kid myself that it was coarse flour, rather than fine grain). To discover at the end of all this that I had only two cups of flour was rather a disappointment. I must say that it added a nutty complexity to the loaf I used it in, and a very ‘artisan’ texture; however, the game didn’t quite seem worth the candle. Nevertheless, when I next brew a stout,I might grind those darker, maltier grains, and steal a little of the liquid malt I use in my beer (which should darken the colour of the bread and add some sweetness) and see whether I get close to a black bread.

If all the above sounds like a long, often disappointing struggle, I should add that every one of the unsuccessful attempts to recreate my youth produced a bread that was perfectly edible, often very enjoyable and always preferable to any non-sourdough shop bread; its only fault was that it wasn’t my madeleine.

And finally, at this point in writing my blog, I usually ask Micha’el to send one or two up-to-date photos. My telepathic son (I never reveal to him the subject of the blog) sent this.