Award winning cheese breadsticks with chipotle

Tony's Market is a few blocks south, it's a good walk there and back. Always a hassle to drive and park by comparison even though those things are made convenient on both sides and it's close. Best just to walk. Plus it limits what can be carried. The place is on the high end of everything. Yesterday I noticed their rib eye steaks were going for $25.00 LB and that's a lot. They look very good. And they're aged. That sort of thing. All departments are like that. It's an urban food desert, perishables are expensive to cart in here and manage. The front behind the striped awning is a grill that serves buffalo and Kobe beef hamburgers.  

The people who work there know what they're doing. They all have a knack and an interest. They are all very interested in people who are interested. They are interesting themselves and interested in sharing that interest and open to interesting interests in others and having it, they're all so terribly i-i-i-i-i-i-i-interesting when it comes to matters of food.

I bragged about my light as air cheese breadstick discovery. Through trial and error and having a target I devised the most astounding breadstick. I learned the secret. Speaking of nibbling, once you get started you cannot stop, nibble, nibble, nibble, like a bunny until the stick is gone, poof, turned to cheese dust inside your mouth with a small wad of compressed delicious substance, somewhat hot with lingering capsaicin heat, easily swallowed and you're reaching immediately for the next stick to continue the process of stick-nibbling as if one long never ending light as air cheese breadstick. 

"Oh yeah, yeah, right." "Yeah." "Heard it!" " Right, oh yeah, right, right, right." "Tell us more. Go on then. Right. We hear this. Right. Right. Yeah Right." 

They were Heckle and Jeckling me. They totally hazed me jocularly all in good play, still, they didn't believe me one single bit and said so flatly. Their combined behavior is 100% opposite of all behavior noted so far. Why such a difference? 

This puzzled me for a long time.

Oh! They were outside this time. They were on their break together. I interrupted their break with my unrestrained brag. Inside I'm  customer who is treated with extreme respect while outside I'm just another mate treated as equal. A kind of a sports-equal mate. That's how they sounded.

"Fine then. It's on!" "Oh, it's ON! LIke Donkey Kong." 

I'll tell you what happened. 

This batch, 2 tablespoons bacon grease, 4 Tablespoons olive oil.

Cheese has salt. Balance with type of salt, here flaky so more is used, and type of cheese, here dense and salty so less is used. Confusing innit. 

This first cup of flour and all of the water whipped up with a knife is quite loose. You can see the stringy gluten develop while whipping. This is all the gluten development this bread is having. After the oil then it will not be possible to develop much more. The second cup of flour will not become stringy this way. This dough is a bit different than usual bread dough. It feels different. It behaves differently. Half the usual gluten development and that done the easy way by whipping while liquid. 

1/4 cup of cheese and that doesn't seem like much and it isn't. It is flavoring. And this cheese flavors very well. It also has fat and salt, so this cheese substance, whatever you choose, everything I tried works, counts for those two things too. That's why everything is understated. The temptation is go overboard and I usually do and that turns out alright too. This is best. Because after ten or so light as air breadsticks in a row all that lingering flavor adds up quickly. 

The dough is more oily than most bread dough. It's cracker dough.

The final flour added in increments this way for a moist stiff dough. More stiff than usual bread dough. More wet without stickiness because of the oil. Gluten connectivity is inhibited. 

Baked 10 minutes each, separately in center of oven, so that's 30 minutes total. Then they're soft, like bread. We don't want that. We want them dry and crunchy. When snapped crumb dust go flying like powder. Oven still hot but turned off, cooled breadsticks returned while oven cools completely. Overnight is fine. They get better as they stale in this controlled way. If anything moisture-y about them, then turn on the oven, then off, and dry out again, without actually baking any further. Dryness is important for the whole thing to work. 

"Breadsticks" in the seachbox top left will bring the ones I showed before. They're all the same thing.  

I packed the whole lot wrapped in plastic put the incredibly light bundle into my backpack and took off walking. Once there the whole place was slow and quiet, a lull in activity allowed employees to gather in clusters, I approached one of the original blokes with whom I made the bet last week. I handed him the package, the three joked, they're a bit cliquish. One breadstick broke. A tiny piece was loose. He put the tiny piece in his mouth and I left for the deli just a few yards away. That is all I saw anyone eat. That one tiny broken piece. As far as I know, they could throw away the whole bundle. 

What was the award? 

The award this batch of cheese breadsticks with chipotle won is the admiration of my peers at Tony's. The greatest award a food-type can have. 

I'm at the deli buying two more Salisbury steaks, delicious by the way, expensive and delicious. I am engaged with the guy behind the counter regaling him with another food-related story. A man approached from the back, physically turned me around, grabbed my hand and shook vigorously and pumped my arm like water would come pouring out of my mouth. It is the British guy, the other original guy I bet last week. Those two now know what I was bragging about. He was excited. Very excited. People don't behave this excited. The behavior is unseemly, unBritish. He grabbed my whole body and squeezed. Hard. 

What if I farted? What if poop squeezed out of me? An athletic type, he is, strong, and I was assaulted. You know our whole digestive tract is an open ended system, and not just one opening, two, one on front and back, top and bottom both ends, he squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste with caps at each end. Anything could have squeezed out of me right there in my pants, right there in an upscale market. Most unusual behavior. I didn't know these people get this excited. He said, "As advertised." He shook his head "no" in disbelief and repeated, "As advertised" then found words for what animated him so strongly, he said, "You know," He's just amazed, he is gesticulating wildly, "we get a LOT of people come in here and talk up a good food-game but yooOOOoou delivahd!" He was chuffed someone actually did what they bragged about. Brag. Accurately describe. Same thing.  Right then another man who I don't know barged in from the opposite corner of the space and introduced himself hastily and excitedly as buyer for their baked goods. He interrogated me about ingredients until he had all of it, the idea, and the technique. He was genuinely interested. You see, these delicious light as air cheese breadsticks with chipotle that go poof to cheese powder in your mouth are BETTER than the breadsticks they sell for a very high price. Of course they're interested. They want to own it. Win. 

I'm telling you, I could easily sell this stuff if I cared to push it. That's why I'm showing it so much. But I'd rather just have the admiration of peers and none of the trouble of marketing and taxes and profit and loss and business.

Update: This award for $10.00 came by email a few days later. It notes my last purchase, this day I described. Nice. A gesture that means nothing compared with admiration of peers. I don't know if the $10 award and the breadsticks are connected. Maybe they award people $10 all the time. I don't know. There is no message.