After watching the first season of Julia on HBO in the last couple of months, my appreciation and admiration of Julia Child has grown immensely. Though I’d always respected her and thought she was fun and quirky, I never realized before exactly how ahead of her time she truly was. So after watching the show, I decided to read her memoir, published shortly after she passed and co-written with her husband’s grand-nephew, called Julia Child: My Life in France.

One interesting thing I’ve learned while reading it that I never really thought much about before was the nutritional value of something as basic as all-purpose white flour across different countries. I suppose at a superficial level, I’d thought about what “wheat” is in the U.S. vs. say, in Italy, because a lot of people who claim to have gluten allergies/problems in the U.S. travel to Italy and find that they can somehow eat copious amounts of pasta there and have zero negative reactions. But I didn’t actually think about the vitamins and minerals and how that composition would be different. Julia brings this up in her memoir as she (based in the U.S.) and her writing partner Simca (based in Paris) are testing out recipes for what would eventually become her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. They are corresponding via phone and snail mail about their endless tests on making bread, and they can never reach the same baked result and are frustrated as to why. But then, they both realize that the reason they cannot get the same result… is that their raw ingredients are just NOT the same in quality.

For one, Julia remembers that while she lived in France, anytime she had flour in the house, it had a very short shelf life and would go rancid within 2-3 months in the pantry, attracting endless maggots, which was actually a sign of pride for the French, she claimed. The reason for this is that it was an indicator of exactly how fresh the flour was. In contrast, the all-purpose flour she used in the U.S. could last years on the shelf, with nothing going “off” about it. The main reason for this is that in the U.S., the focus was less on keeping the ingredient (in this case, wheat flour) in its purest and thus most nutritious form; the primary goal was to keep the shelf life as long as possible. But in order to get to that hyper shelf-stable state, the flour would have to go through intense processing and heat treatments, which would ultimately reduce the nutritional profile of the flour. And that was why French flour was not American flour, and why they could not get the same results from baking using the same recipe in their two countries.

In other words, the majority of all-purpose flour in the U.S. is just empty calories. While it does have some nutrition, such as certain levels of B vitamins, folate, selenium, riboflavin, niacin, manganese, and phosphorus, it pales in comparison to flour you find on the shelves in most of the rest of the world, especially countries in the EU that actually care about what they put into their bodies.

This brief section of her book made me so sad. I mean, who doesn’t want to believe that when they eat chocolate chip cookies in the U.S. that there has to be some redeeming quality to the cookie in the form of some nutritional value from the flour…?

What always puzzled me about mixes I’d see that were imported from India was that you would rarely see any artificial colorings or ingredients on the ingredients list the way you do here in the U.S. You would simply see the ingredients you’d expect to see. For example, appam, a rice/lentil based hopper that is popular in the state of Kerala, is traditionally made with ground rice and lentils, fermented with toddy, but in modern times, people use yeast. If you saw a mix like this made in the U.S,, it would probably have all these weird preservatives, artificial colorings and flavor enhancers. But the mix I got for almost nothing at a Hypermarket in Kochi when we were there in June just had three ingredients listed: ground rice, ground lentils, and yeast. Nothing more, nothing less. I also noticed the expiration date meant the shelf life of this mix would be far shorter than anything made here, but maybe that was the point: it’s fine to have mixes in India, but you just have to use them within a shorter period of time to ensure it doesn’t go rancid, plus it doesn’t NEED anything to preserve it to last longer.

So I used it today, simply adding some sugar, a pinch of salt, water, and 1/2 cup of coconut milk. The batter easily rose and grew poofy. I was out of practice making appams, though, and had to add a lot more water to get the right crepe-like consistency of the batter. But when I finally got that right, plus the temperature of the appam pan, the batter sizzled on contact with the pan, plus the nice lacy edges we associate with appams started appearing. I was getting back into practice with this process, and it was so much fun!

So I suppose my vilification of pre-made mixes is really just about American ones with all their gross preservatives and artificial flavorings and ingredients. I can definitely get behind the Indian mixes more fully and more often!

On Thursday, I tested out the last two of my six dry active yeast packets that I purchased right before Kaia’s birth, and to my delight, they were both still active and very much alive. That means that my success rate was 5 for 6; only one of the six packets I purchased was actually a goner. These last two would be used to make two fat challah loaves. I couldn’t even remember the last time I made challah, but every time I make it, I get so, so happy. I love how the dough poofs up and gets huge and pillowy. I especially love the process of braiding the strands. Doing a double egg wash, then topping with sesame or poppy seeds always makes me feel so satisfied. This time around, I added some whole wheat flour to make the bread a little more nutritious (hopefully that’s not too offensive to any Jews reading this!), and it worked out really well: the loaves baked up super big, puffy, golden brown, and the crumb was extremely soft, tender, and moist. The whole wheat flour gave the bread a nice, subtle nuttiness, not to mention a pale tan sheen to the crumb that I wasn’t quite used to (it’s usually more on the yellowish/beige side because of the eggs in the dough). Chris declared it one of the best loaves I’d made.

You don’t have to be Jewish to love and appreciate challah. You just need to love good food made with TLC.

On Sunday afternoon, I tested another dry active yeast packet from two years ago to see if it was still alive, and I was in luck: it was the 3rd one that was alive out of four, so I have a 75% success rate so far (just two more packets to go!). I wanted to make something easy that would not yield too much, as we are really pushing it with the tiny bit of space still left in our freezer. So I decided on pandesal, a Filipino bread roll (literally meaning “salt bread,” though I have no idea why since there’s so little salt in it…) that is known for being like a round dinner roll. It’s characterized by being very soft, airy, and subtly sweet. Versions also exist other than the regular one with eggs, sugar, and oil that have ube or pandan, but I just wanted something quick and I didn’t want to buy any more ingredients, and so I stuck with the plain version to begin with. I was also disheartened to see that most versions of the ube pandesal recipe online called for artificial ube extract, which is exactly what I did not want. If I’m making it at home, I want it to be all natural with no artificial ingredients! Some versions use ube powder, which I assume to be dried, ground up ube, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I actually saw the ingredients on the packet. So I guess I can keep a lookout for it the next time I’m at a Filipino grocery store.

It was quick to put together the dough, though quite soft and sticky. I kneaded it well in the bowl on Sunday, then rolled it out on Monday and allowed it a second rise. Then, I baked it in the oven at 350 F for 20 minutes, and they came out perfectly: beautifully and evenly browned on top, with a nice, pillowy, airy inside. The dough is sweet, but not too sweet, so I was comfortable giving Pookster some as a treat at the end of dinner. And boy, did she gobble it up! I didn’t want her to have a full bun, so I ended up taking two generous bites out of hers when she offered me some, which of course caused her to wail nonstop (she believes sharing is caring… to a degree :D).

Few homemade things are more satisfying to me than the result of successful, tasty homemade bread. It always hits the spot and makes me feel really accomplished when it comes out right.