ever tasted. It ensures that your customers, when examining their bread
baskets, will exclaim, "Where did you get this bread?" and "Where can I
buy this bread?" It also means that your life will be a waking nightmare,
that every corner of your walk-ins and kitchen shelving will be likely to
contain various sinister-looking and foul-smelling science experiments:
rotting grapes, fermenting red peppers, soggy buckets of mushroom
trimmings—the gills and stems decomposing into noxious, black sludge
—all of them destined for "the bitch" or one of her many offspring,
smaller batches of starter that have been flavored with, or "started" by
one of these primordial oozes. Walk-ins will contain buckets of slowed-
down starter and forgotten batches of dead starter. Freezers will be
loaded with half-baked boules, frozen sour mix, the floors sticky with
dough. Like some virulent snail, Adam leaves tracks.
But, he also leaves the "stuff": the most amazing olive and herb breads,
pepper bread, mushroom bread, focaccias, pizzas, garlic twists,
breadsticks and brioches. He claims to be of Sicilian heritage, affecting
the mannerisms and gestures and expressions of the street guinea from
some Scorsese-inspired Brooklyn—but is he, actually of Italian lineage?
No one knows for sure. Steven claims to have seen his birth certificate—
the real one, mind you—and that his real last name is Turkish or Arab.
But who knows? Documentation from Adam is always of dubious
provenance. His cooking background is certainly Italian, no question
there, he is not to be relied on for baguettes. If you believe him—which
you shouldn't—he was taught to bake by Lydia Bastianich (he's fond of
showing off a tattered and dog-eared copy of one of her books, inscribed
to one of his many known aliases).
He's worked, to my direct knowledge, as a cook, chef, consultant, pie
man at pizzerias, deli help, pâtissier and baker. Half of what comes out
of his mouth is utter bullshit—the rest, suspicious at best. He is
perpetually broke and in debt. The corner deli, says Steven, gives him
credit, as does his local bar, and Adam pays them during the good times
and stiffs them in the bad. He's always headed off to Little Italy to pay