20. Make aioli from scratch (no cheating with Hellman's).

It works, bitches:



It did not turn out to be painless.  I followed the recipe in the Silver Palate cookbook, which calls for two egg yolks and 1½ cups of oil.  I dutifully poured the oil into the running food processor in a hair-thin stream.  Right up until the very end it was unbelievably perfect.  After pouring the last of the oil and admiring my emulsified darling as it whipped around the bowl, I turned away for a moment to attend to the asparagus.  When I turned back, it had fallen apart and collapsed into a curdly, soupy slop.

Julia Child insists that a turned mayonnaise can be fixed by whipping an egg yolk and emulsifying the failed stuff back into it.  I did that, but about halfway through I could tell it wasn't going to finish, and in a few seconds there was nothing left.

Then I read that ¾ cup is the maximum amount of oil you can use per egg yolk.  If you have never made a mayonnaise before, Julia confides, it is best to start with ½ cup.  Oh.  Well, then.

So I threw it out and started from scratch with three egg yolks instead of two, and gosh if it didn't, like, work.  Damn.

The most amusing part is that it isn't even that good.  After the first failed batch I got thinking that maybe I put in too much lemon juice, or mustard, or something that just made it a little too hard to hold together.  So the second time I cut way back on all of those ingredients -- which of course are the things that actually make the aioli taste like something.

So what I ended up with is a sauce that tastes like .... 1½ cups of extra-virgin olive oil.  And a little raw garlic.  Yeah.  Even I can't get enthusiastic about that.

But really, I barely even care.  Because now I can make my own aioli.  My new emulsifying technique is UNSTOPPABLE!

As a bonus, I even made pain l'ancienne out of The Bread Baker's Apprentice:



And yes, it tasted as good as it looks. Oh yes. Victory is mine, and it is hot and crusty.

Summary: I want to learn to make a better bread.  My mother, like her father before her, is fantastic at bread.  I don't seem to have inherited the knack.  My boys have grown up believing that bread is something you buy in a store, and it's depressing and discouraging.

So I am attempting to teach myself to bake an irresistable loaf of bread.  The kind of chewy, crusty bread that takes you by the throat and begs to be eaten.  The kind that must be baked in at least two loaves at a time because the first one disappears within minutes of coming out of the oven.

I tried several iterations of an oatmeal molasses bread I found in one of our old Sunset cookbooks, figuring that if I want a chewy, sweet loaf, oatmeal bread is the way to go, but it kept coming out dry and crumbly.  (See what I mean?  I must be cursed if I have figured out how to make oatmeal bread dry and coarse.)

Tonight I decided to go back to first principles and made the white sandwich loaf in The New Best Recipe.  The comments in the book were very interesting -- that most of the loaves they tried need very little kneading after all, and they found that they generally came out better when kneaded by machine than by hand.  My first effort is currently cooling on the rack, and while I fear that I overbaked it again, it seems to have come out a perfect size and shape.  Here's hoping.