On grocery shopping and bread

A lot of people ask me where we get the ingredients for our classes. The short answer is, I go grocery shopping a lot. We get some stuff from Sysco, which is the Microsoft of food suppliers: everyone sort of hates them, everyone still uses them. Actually, I shouldn't badmouth Sysco, because our rep is nice (hi Carlo!), and they've given us a semi-permanent exemption from the minimum order amount because we're just a little too small to ever quite make it. Anyway, we get stuff like flour, sugar, paper products, dish detergent, and trash bags from Sysco.

Then there is a pantheon of stores I do "specialty shopping" at, including Asian markets, Indian markets, Vitamin Cottage (for very large quantities of wheat bran to make bran muffins), King Soopers (for the kind of sparkling water we use in the cafe), Safeway (for the gyoza wrappers I like to use for potstickers), and a few others.

Most of the good stuff--produce, cheese, meat, strange legumes--we get from Sunflower Market, which is like Whole Foods without the attitude or alternative economic system. There's a Sunflower about a mile from Generous Servings, so I can walk there with my teen camps, not to mention stopping there on my way to and from home. I go to Sunflower, on average, more than once a day. Despite my omnipresence, I got the cold shoulder when I tried to negotiate a discount. They told me they don't do discounts, although a chef behind me in line one day got a discount on his purchase. After much effort, I convinced Sunflower to let me do a cooking demonstration there a couple of weeks ago, and they're finally starting to warm up to me. Apparently before they saw me in action, they thought I was lying when I told them that I teach cooking classes.

Tonight I was in Sunflower, as usual, but I hadn't eaten dinner and I was starving. One sad fact about Sunflower is that their prepared foods (soups, pasta salad, etc.) are really bad, so that wasn't going to be a solution to my starvation. I decided to get the ingredients for a veggie sandwich, a dish I perfected a decade ago when I worked in a microbiology lab in Charlottesville, Virginia. I used to make these sandwiches whenever I didn't have any leftovers to bring for lunch, and they were so good that I would look forward to lunch all morning. The sandwich has cucumbers, tomatoes, roasted red peppers (which I keep in my freezer), maybe a little mesclun mix, and hopefully alfalfa sprouts on it. If you have some boursin cheese, it's awesome as a spread, or you can smoosh some ripe avocado on. If you have both boursin and avocado, oh happy day. I got so good at making this sandwich that I could do it all with one knife, which requires peeling the cucumber with a bread knife. But the real secret to the sandwich was the bread.

There was a bread bakery in Charlottesville called the Albemarle Baking Company, which made the most fantastic baguette I've ever had. The most fantastic by an order of magnitude. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just making up the memory of this bread, but I know that's not the case because I actually discovered this bread on two independent occasions. The first was when I took a semester off from Yale and went down to Charlottesville to apprentice to a chef in a little bed and breakfast restaurant. They served this fantastic bread at the restaurant I worked in, but I didn't know where it came from, and it never occurred to me that private citizens might be able to obtain the bread for themselves. After I finished my apprenticeship, I went back to college and finished my degree, and then I moved back to Charlottesville for a year. Halfway through that year, I bought a sandwich from a coffee shop, and I realized that it was made with the same mythical bread that I remembered from the restaurant. This time I asked where they got the bread, and they told me about the Albemarle Baking Company. For the next several months, I bought as much of the bread as I could (they often sold out of the baguettes, and even when they had them there was a limit on how much each person could buy). Usually I would eat a whole baguette in the car on the way home. After I moved from Charlottesville, I assumed I'd eventually find equally good bread in California, but I never did, despite buying baguettes at dozens of bakeries. Denver hasn't even come close, so if you've got a nomination, please pass it on.

So tonight I was stumped about what bread to buy for my veggie sandwich. I started feeling sorry for myself that I never have time to bake bread, which then made me laugh because I actually bake bread most days of the week, it just isn't directly for me. In my previous life, before cooking was my job, I used to have lots of interesting food in my refrigerator and freezer at home. Now my fridge looks like those of some of the guys I dated in grad school: all I have are beverages and condiments. I've exhausted all of my frozen emergency rations, too, so there's no hope that I might dig out some good bread. Sunflower sells a lot of artisan breads, but I felt them through the wrappers and all the crusts were soft, which is not a good sign. I ended up buying some ciabatta, and by the time I got home (after swinging by King Soopers; why go shopping at one place when you can easily stop at two?) I was starting to self-digest. I toasted the bread, which helped a lot, and made my sandwich (with no roasted red peppers, because of course I don't have any of those in my freezer anymore), and you know what? It was great. Even the bread tasted pretty good. Avocado hides a multitude of flaws. Now I will patiently await the next time I know I'll have good bread, in my Secrets of Baking Fantastic Breads class next week. Mmmmmm.