reading peter reinhart’s book ‘the bread baker’s apprentice: mastering the art of extraordinary bread’ and how he’s been humbled by a delayed fermentation technique he learned from a baker named Gosselin and is now ‘revising’ the methods he described in his previous book on bread is sort of like watching the beastie boys when they took back their ‘ignorant homophobic’ attitudes on their first album.

black cod cooked in miso drives my cat bananas.

really. it’s pretty good. but it’s two to three times as expensive as other breads of better quality? (acme, cheese board, etc.) less good — more money. yum. smells like windows.

if you think so it only means you haven’t tasted the a real olive boule from acme, a baguette from hopkins or a cheese roll from the cheese board. and i don’t even live in the bay area. don’t care for it really. except for the bread. ok, and of course royal coffee. though can’t start on about coffee today.
truth is the really telling thing is there’s a video out of nancy silverton slapping bread around with one hand, she says she’s learned to always keep one hand free in case the phone rings.
someone sell her some plastic wrap, p-p-p-pleasse!!!!!

the great corner of san pablo and cedar is home to cafe fanny, acme bread and the kermit lynch wine store. large parking lot suitable for camping out in and making a home for oneself. acme bread, while owning the world of crustable breads up in the bay area, and perhaps anywhere, happily, eagerly and most generously gives out their starter. you can even borrow a container from next door to carry out your goop.

call it foul or shameful or just plain assinine, but nothing quite feels as rotten and sucky as asking someone for something and that someone refusing to give it to you, even though they are going to throw it away after you leave.
so the deal with sourdough starter is that every time you feed it you’ll end up with extra which you can add to the billions of jars of previously leftover bits of starter or you throw it away, since tomorrow there will always be more. that is, unless you’re a burgeoning new cooperative in berkeley called arizmendi that thinks it’s peecee and thinks it’s equi-fair and thinks it’s pro-labor and anti-republican and eco-earth and save the whales. arizmendi who claims to practice the fine art of bay area cooperative business practices. arizmendi who co-mingles cheese and sourdough and seedy baguettes and currant scones and wolverines using the EXACT recipes, oven specifications, kneading techniques, sifting pore size and water temperature of the one and only CHEESE BOARD. arizemendi who took the cheese board’s 30 years of experience and coop know-how and generosity and dedication to collective ownership and free pizzas while you wait and share and share alike attitudes and turned it into a crude and shameful 7 word sentence which reads: “no we don’t give away our starter.”

ps. they’re going to throw it away anyway.