The bakers across the counter from me rolled their cracker dough into perfect squares. Mine looked like somebody had thrown up shoe leather.
Cracker The first cracker dough I learned was lean and simple: flour, salt, fennel, and water, rolled thin and baked hot. By a series of improbable events I’d wound up a pastry assistant at Cue, a restaurant in Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. I had no experience, so the first assignments were tedious. Sake-soaked apricots had been cut into small dice that were not small enough, so it was my job, on my first day, to cut them smaller. I went at it in the sort of chiffonading flurry you see on cooking shows until the pastry chef—a fine talent who was a sufficiently difficult person that she’d be fired later that year—explained to me brunoise: perfect cubes of about an eighth of an inch square. (The actual phrase she used, not for the last time, was “very perfect.”) After I brunoised the apricots I peeled rhubarb, which is too fibrous to be peeled with a peeler: you take a knife to each end and, piece by piece, pull away the skin. It’s a graceful-looking act but it takes a long time.
Bread Margaret made rolls for dinner service until she handed the job off to me. Every day I’d poke around the prep cooler for herbs and cheeses I could throw into the next day’s bread, making the dough that day, chilling it overnight, and baking it in the morning. The Guthrie was a godawful-ugly new building with a clunky balcony stretching over the Mississippi; sometimes I’d go out and watch the steam rise over the river at dawn. The finest skill I learned was to shape two rolls in each hand at the same time, pushing them in circles against the counter. It had a pretty suggestive look to it.
