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04/16/2004: "I am the anti-Atkins"

Carbs...

If you believe Dr. Atkins, they'll be the death of you.

I'm not sure who's reading this, if anyone (sound of knuckles on the glass (polycarbonate?) on your screen), and I'm not sure I care, either.

Not many people know it, but I am the anti-Atkins.

Three mornings a week, I wake up around 3 a.m. and bake nearly 100 croissants and Danish, to be delivered to, as one friend put it, "the local hoitey-toitey whole-foods".link

The other four mornings a week, I get up at 6 a.m. to deliver them, when Tim bakes them.

This is a fairly new thing for me. After 20 years in the computer field, having my fill of various Veep and CxO positions, I end up buying a white elephant of a house and in the process, ended up baking. Its been 6 months now since I started (and it was a fairly rough start), and I think I'm ruined.

The coissants you get at your local supermarket are, in a word, crap. They're lifeless, almost unedible. A real artisan bread, hand-made by craftsmen rather than machines, takes hours of skilled care and pride. Making the dough is itself a 3-day process, most of this time the dough ferments for 36 hours to develop lots of flavor, with 4 'turns' where the layers that give croissants their flakyness are formed.

All bread starts with the same raw ingredients -- water, flour, salt and some form of leavening -- and by fermentation, draw out the natural sweetness from the wheat.

At some point, I became aware that the dough is, quite litterally, alive.

It has its negatives. The hours suck, and dealing with the original pastry chef here, showed me exactly what people have oft complained about in reference to working with me in the tech industry. Michael was an asshole, but invaluable, since he was my sensei.

Now that he's gone, Tim and I have the freedom to be creative. We're currently attempting to re-create Michael's orange rolls, pictured here

Its been a great period of recovery for me.