The Fugue

I was in the LA area for Von's wedding, and dragged my family across Hollywood to get some "San Fransisco Sourdough" bread from Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery. (Nancy shall hereafter be referred to as the grapestart lady.) It was good stuff. The crust was everything you dream of in an artisan crust and the crumb was delicious. One of the reasons I wanted to go there was because the La Brea Bakery won some SF Sourdough contest one year, beating out Acme baking company. This is interesting as La Brea is in LA, not SF. (Take that you stuck up San Fransiscans) I wanted to see what "San Francisco Sourdough" really was, for two reasons: to see if it's worth the hype and to see if the sourdough bread I bake is similar or not. Now that I've tasted it, I can say that it's not worth the hype, precisely because it tastes just like my sourdough bread. My sourdough bread is made from a sourdough start that supposedly came from Poland back in the day but mostly lived in New Mexico then Utah and again in New Mexico. When I get it right, it's good and tastes just like grapestart lady's bread (except for the crust - more on that later). But it's not something magical that can only be reproduced in California.

The big difference between grapestart lady's bread and mine is that hers has that nice artisan crust and mine doesn't. I'm doing some experiments with crust later this week, so keep your eyes open.

Now, on the way home (sort of), we're in Las Vegas. At Redbeard's recommendation we had lunch at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. (Bobby Flay will hereafter be referred to as grill boy.) They brought us some bread: some "Italian Ciabatta", some cornbread muffin things, and some sesame whole wheat cranberry stuff. It was all excellent, but the ciabatta was beyond excellent. It was, in fact, far beyond the sourdough baguette from La Brea. It had a nice open crumb (grapestart lady's was fairly uniform and boring), and its artisan crust was still crispy and chewy, but not as much work to just eat as grapestart lady's. It wasn't purporting to be sourdough, but it was obvious to me that it was naturally leavened and had all kinds of delicious tastes including sourdough. I was very impressed. The burger was ok, too.

So we can learn a few lessons here. Maybe La Brea had a bad day or Mesa Grill had a good day, or maybe it had to do with the difference between ciabatta and baguette. But it's clear that you needn't believe the hype, that California is not inherently superior, and that grill boy rivals grapestart lady in making bread. Who would have guessed?