We Have New Bread

Dogmatic switched baguettes. We were using baguettes from Tom Cat, and I liked them. They had a nice golden-brown color and a crust that shattered pleasantly when you bit into it. This, however, meant that when we cut the Tom Cat baguettes at the cart in the morning their crusts shattered and made a big crummy mess. The Tom Cat baguettes had an airy interior that sank quite effortlessly onto our toasting spikes, too.

Now we're using baguettes from Pain d'Avignon. Their crust does not have the same deep caramel color, but their crumb is denser and tangier. I'm not sure which baguettes I prefer. Every day I do little experiments, seeing how long it takes to get a good toast on the interiors of the Pain d'Avignon baguettes (longer than Tom Cat) and tasting little bits of bread to get a handle on their flavor. This baguette switch has provided me with way too much entertainment, but I'm a nerd and find these bread comparisons intriguing.

The other day someone from Berkeley, CA's collective The Cheese Board came by with a few of her friends. She was in town for a co-op convention and had read about Dogmatic in the Times. I told about our recent baguette switch, which led to a little bread talk. Nice. Despite its name, the Cheese Board is known more for its baked goods than its cheeses (not to put down its cheeses). They sell pizza by the pie and by the slice, and the line for this pizza is usually too long for somone like me, soneome who thinks people who wait in line for an hour just to eat are saps.

But I have had Cheese Board pizza a few times. They make one kind of pizza a day and that's it. Every time I've been there it's a sauceless pizza. They seem to alternate between three-onion/three-cheese and three-mushroom/three-cheese. The crust is great, but to me it's more like very cheesy flatbread than actual pizza.

The Cheese Board is in Berkeley's fabled Gourmet Ghetto, not far from Chez Panisse. I used to drive through down Shattuck through the Gourmet Ghetto quite often, usually on my way to Amoeba to get records. In fact, just typing this is making me quite nostalgic--every day this happens. I recall our life in California and I look around and think "Why the fuck did we move to New York?" But then I think about all of the brazen pedestrians in the Gourmet Ghetto, Berkeley intellectual types with their 3,000-dollar strollers and fair trade hemp beanies and shit, how they'd just stroll right into the street no matter what because they were too busy thinking about getting a soy latte at Peet's to bother looking. I almost hit this dumb-ass UC Berkeley student right in front of the Cheese Board, in fact. That's exactly what drove me nuts about living in the San Francisco Bay area. Of course, New Yorkers jaywalk as well, but it's different, somehow.

All of the time I mull over how my husband and I moved across the country so I could get a great job and here I am, working part-time at a sausage cart. It's a way better job than the job I had in Berkeley. I guess we could move anywhere and there will be wonderful aspects and crappy ones. And there will always be eccentric, low-paying service jobs waiting.