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DINNERIN25MINUTES


Chicken salad Pineapple, grapes and almonds up the crunch factor. E2


FOOD Breadwinner


wednesday, july 28, 2010 The perfect way to have interesting


earthiness in an easy griddled package.” —Washington baker Lisa Yockelson on her ‘bran-muffin’ waffles, E6


SPIRITS


Tales wrapup Jason Wilson’s trend report finds speak-easies are out, Zucca’s coming in. E5


MORERECIPES Five-Spice Rubbed Halibut With Peach-Ginger Relish E2 Wheaty ‘Bran-Muffin’ Waffles E6 Indian-Spiced Okra ONLINE WASHINGTONCOOKS


Silver Spring baker builds on her expertise by constructing a wood-fired oven


BY BONNIE S. BENWICK The infrared gun registers 900 de-


grees just a fewfeet away fromTishHall’s face on a brutal July morning, but the Silver Springhomemakerhasn’t brokena sweat. She is in the zone, tending the wood-


fired oven she built in her back yard. Its outside domed walls are barely warm to the touch. On the work table nearby, her proofed and slashed loaves are lined up onflouredwoodenboards, awaiting their turn to rise and crisp on the oven floor. As the 51-year-old surveys her orderly


yeasted universe — you can almost hear her checking off amental to-do list— her gaze turns to a large Lexan container filled with a living thing, a cornmeal- white dough of her own recipe. “This one always does what I want it


to do,” she says. It seems fitting that the self-taught


bread baker would be drawn to the notion of a cob oven, made of found materials. That is what she settled on in 2009, after years of baking in a conven- tional oven, after much research and after input from her dad, Robert, an 81-year-oldwho lives in La Plata and is so all-around handy that he has been dubbed theHuman Swiss Army Knife.


cooks continued on E3 RECIPES l Chocolate Bread E6 l Cheddar Chive Onion Bread ONLINE ESSAY Lovin’ the big oven, especially for pizza BY SAMUEL FROMARTZ Bakers, especially obsessed home bak-


ers, are always looking for an edge: a special tip, technique, tool or prayer that will bring their loaf or pizza closer to perfection. Count me among them. I’ve baked at


PHOTOS BY JAMES M. THRESHER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


Above: Flatbread pizzas fresh from TishHall’s wood-fired cob oven in her Silver Spring back yard. In her order of baking, which is dictated by the waning heat, the pizzas go in before loaves of bread (inset, top right) that she bakes in the outdoor oven on Fridays.


home for more than a decade, and al- though I’ve made terrific bread – even baguettes – I never thought my pizza made it into the same league as that from Seventh Hill Pizza on Capitol Hill or 2


Amys inClevelandPark. I’d triedmany recipes, overnight rises,


two-day rises, no-knead doughs, sour- dough starters, soft imported Italian 00 flour and strong American bread flour, and had gotten pretty good results. But they weren’t eye-popping. They weren’t extraordinary. And that’s what I wanted. Amazingpizza!


essay continued on E6


RECIPE lBasic Flatbread E6


E EZ


Where great grapes are born BY DAVEMCINTYRE


Special to The Washington Post NicholasMiller seemed reluctant to


extol the virtues of BienNacido Vine- yards as he drove me around the prop- erty his family has farmed for four decades in Califor- nia’s northern Santa Barba-


WINE


ra County. I was there to write about an iconic American vineyard that is famed for producing some of the country’s best wines, but all he wanted to talk about


was the weather. “The SantaMaria Valley has the long-


est growing season of any wine region in California, with bud break sometimes as early as February,”Miller said. Although it’s in Southern California, the valley, like much of Santa Barbara County, is considered a cool-climate region for grapes.He pointed to the west, where the SantaMaria River flows into the Pa- cific 17 miles away through flat land that offers no barrier to ocean fog and cool-


wine continued on E5


Raw-food Fridays come to D.C.


Caterer’s cause gives diners four courses of uncooked menu options


BY JANE BLACK For 22 years,Washington caterer Eliz-


abeth Petty has been serving elegant dishes such as lamb carpaccio with goat cheese and herb-grilled poussin with spinach custard and morels. Until last year, one of the perks was getting to taste them all. In April 2009, Petty, then 49, learned


she had breast cancer. By August, she put herself on a strict raw-food diet that meant nomeat, dairy, caffeine, processed sugar and alcohol, or even fruits and vegetables with high levels of natural sugar.What was still permitted could not be heated above 105 degrees. Petty didn’t especially miss those


The San RafaelMountains channel ideal wine-growing weather past the BienNacido Vineyards in SantaMaria, Calif.


foods; the subsequent treatment took away most of her appetite. But, she says, “I had to change my whole psyche. So many people live to eat. I was eating to live.” Now Petty is bringing raw food to


Washington in an occasional restaurant in the gracious second-floor dining room at her catering headquarters on L Street NW. On July 16, at the debut of Eliza- beth’s Gone Raw, she offered a $55


SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST


four-course raw and organic menu that included creamy coconut soup topped with a cucumber, mango and radish salad and a glossy chocolate ganache tart. The next dinner, which will feature flax seed and hemp flatbread with zuc- chini,hummusand shaved fennel, a Thai noodle salad and aKey lime tart, is set for Aug. 13. The benefit of a raw-food diet is a


matter of controversy. Its proponents say that when food is cooked above a certain temperature — some say 105 degrees, some say 118 degrees—heat destroys the enzymes that aid digestion and absorp-


raw food continued on E3


Starting in September, caterer Elizabeth Petty hopes to serve raw- food dinners in her Northwest catering space once a week.


CHRIS LESCHINSKY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


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