The Boomtown Rap

Back in July 08, I wrote a post entitled Making Your Own GREAT Pizzas At Home. The title was not an exaggeration. I had experimented with multiple pizza recipes before developing one I particularly liked, and with further tweaking over a period of months was consistently getting results that I was pretty pleased with. My pizzas were on a par with all but one of my favourite local pizzerias, and given the restrictions of a domestic oven, I was chuffed with that.

Naturally, I slipped into evangelical mode and posted my recipe on the web for anyone interested. The response was underwhelming, although a few folk emailed me privately to enthuse after trying the recipe. But there were hundreds of pizza recipes on the web, I reasoned – why should massive tribes of pizza pundits flock to my blog? I sulked vaguely for a short time, then got on with enjoying my home-baked lil’ luverlies.

That was not the end of the story – not by a long way. Driven by a restless and at times self-defeating perfectionism, I continued to experiment with my pizzas, but could not improve on the recipe I posted. Then I happened upon a remarkable site of obsession and instruction that set me back on my increasingly well-padded bum with a jolt: Jeff Varasano’s Famous New York Pizza Recipe.

It took all of 20 seconds browsing to conclude that Varasano was a bona fide pizza maniac! He had travelled the world in search of the best pizzas, researched the Italian masters, and wrote in a didactic tone that resisted challenge.

As I pored over the site, it quickly became apparent that the man was no web blowhard. He was obsessed with pizza, and a genuine authority. His quest for the optimum pizza made mine look petty indeed. And one of his paragraphs seemed to point an accusatory finger directly at me!

There are about a hundred books and internet recipes that claim to give an authentic or secret pizza dough recipe. Oddly, while many claim to be secret or special, they are practically all the same. Here it is in summary. If you see this recipe, run screaming:

Sprinkle a yeast packet into warm water between 105-115 F and put in a teaspoon of sugar to feed it. Wait for it to foam up or ‘proof’. Add all your flour to a Kitchen Aid heavy duty mixer, then add the yeast and salt. Now mix until it pulls away from the side of the bowl. Coat with oil and leave in a warm place until it doubles in bulk, about 1-2 hours. Punch down, spread on a peel with some cornmeal to keep it from sticking and put it on the magical pizza stone that will make this taste just like Sally’s in your 500F oven.

I dunno who Sally is, but I do know that the dough recipe Varasano was dissing with such contempt was pretty close to mine! And I had to admit that his claim was correct that the numerous dry yeast pizza dough recipes strewn over the web are, indeed, pretty samey. I had made a few small changes, including adding a little rye to the dough, but really, my tweaks were just tweaks. Now, here was someone claiming he had something different, more authentic, better!

I read the site and re-read it, and the excitement mounted. He was advocating using sourdough starter in the dough! I had recently started baking sourdough bread at home, and was already an addicted breadhead. Anything sourdough was electrically charged for me. Add pizza and the equation was combustible.

On the edge of spontaneous immolation, I spoke sternly to myself. I’d be reduced to smoking ashes soon enough, relatively speaking (which hopefully means a couple of quality decades ahead yet!). So I calmed down to hyper, and set off on a new quest for a home-baked pizza that smashed through the dry yeast barriers to new levels of yumdom.

Jeff Varasano’s recipe was my starting point, and I fully acknowledge him for showing me the way, the truth and the light of home-baked pizzas.

I adhered as closely as possible to his recipe and directions at first, then began to experiment until further tweaks seemed counterproductive. In other words, I think these sourdough pizzas are now about as good as domestic kitchen pizzas get. And yes, I’m gonna share the lurve, right here, right now…

I’ve slightly increased Varasano’s recommended dough hydration, and have adapted his technique to suit my preference for hand-mixing (he uses an electric mixer). This adaptation has necessitated including a small proportion of olive oil in the dough – if anything, I think this enhances the flavour. My topping preparation is also a bit different from Jeff’s.

I stopped short of following his recommendation to tamper with the oven to elevate its maximum temperature to 500C! While I admire and respect that sort of fanaticism, I quietly contend that it is entirely possible to turn out wonderful thin-crust traditional-style pizzas from an unmodded domestic oven. Not charred at the edges and super-light, as is only possible at 500C+, but still up with the best I’ve had at commercial venues, and immeasurably superior to the crappy things franchises like Dominos, Pizza Hut, etc sell by the millions (how’s that for lowering the bar?). Not as good as the incredible thin-crust ones I had from an old woodfired oven pizzeria near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, but not far off, either. I say this not out of boast, but as a pizza tragic (although not on Jeff’s level!) speaking on a wavelength shared by others of my kind. You’ve gotta try this!

Alright, here we go. You’ll need a sourdough starter, which if you’re starting from scratch will take 7 to 14 days to develop to full leavening capacity. Follow the excellent directions here, and you can’t go wrong.

In fact, you may get a whole lot more than you bargained for. An active wild yeast starter is the key to a wondrous new world not only of knockout pizzas, but of home-baked artisan breads and other goodies… if you choose to open that door. I strongly recommend that you do! See these previous posts:
Sourdough Rising – The Home Artisan Bread Baking Revolution
Baking Sourdough Bread At Home: A Beginner’s Guide.



Sourdough Pizza

Equipment:

Large plastic mixing bowl
Plastic dough scraper
Small, round plastic Glad containers (or similar) with lids
Pizza peel or back of cookie baking sheet
Pizza stone

Dough Ingredients (1 pizza)
Multiply ingredient weights by however many pizzas you want to make, or re-scale using bakers’ % provided in right column:

*I use a 100% hydration white starter, or rye/white flour starter. The proportion of starter used here is very small, so the starter hydration is not crucial.

Dough Method (as stated, I do all mixing by hand):

1. Mix all ingredients except salt, cover and rest for 20-40 mins (autolyse).

2. Add salt, and do 20 or 30 stretch-and-folds in bowl with a plastic dough scraper.

3. Pour about 1 tbls olive oil on to bench surface, scrape dough on to bench, knead/squelch between fingers and stretch this way and that until oil begins to be absorbed (2-3 minutes). Change kneading method to “air kneading” (slapping dough repeatedly on bench).

4. If sticking too much during air kneading, add more oil to bench surface and repeat 3.

5. Repeat 4 until gluten is well-developed and dough is smooth and stretchy (but it will still be quite a wet dough). This should take about 5 minutes in total, but always go by dough feel. Return dough to lightly oiled mixing bowl, cover, and rest 20 mins or so.

6. Divide dough into however many pizzas you’re making, using a scale to ensure each piece is equal in weight.

7. Roll into balls and transfer each into its own small lightly oiled plastic container, roll around to cover evenly with oil, and put on lid.

8. After short rest, transfer to fridge. Retard fermentation in fridge 2-3 days (I prefer 3).

Preparing pizza

1. Take dough out of fridge about 1 hour before baking (pre-heat oven and pizza stone to max temperature possible during this time). When dough has returned to room temperature (45 minutes or so, but could be shorter or longer, depending on ambient temperature), empty one dough ball on to moderately floured surface. Forget about showing off that pizza dough tossing technique you’ve been working on – this dough is far too wet for that. Instead, gently and gradually stretch the dough evenly with your fingers, working from the centre out, leaving a small rim at edges. Be firm but not rough – the dough should be very manageable and stretchy, but be careful not to stretch it so thin it tears.

2. When at the size and thickness you want, transfer to semolina-sprinkled peel (or back of cookie sheet). This transfer process can be a bit tricky. I get my partner to lift one side of dough while I lift the other. It will distort in shape in transit, so re-shape when on peel (not always easy – but who cares if it ends up ‘rustic’ in shape, anyway?). Keep giving the peel a shake to make sure the dough is not sticking. If it does stick, work a little more semolina under the sticking part. It is vital to keep checking that it is not sticking as you put the toppings on. I have made the mistake of assuming a tiny bit of sticking shouldn’t matter, that the weight of the pizza would free it for launching with a bit of jerking of the inclined peel and send it sliding cleanly on to the pizza stone – I was spectacularly wrong! (The stuck part remained anchored to the peel while the toppings and rest of the dough ended up in a mess on the hot pizza stone – try cleaning that up after you stubbornly went ahead and decided it was a sort of open calzone you were baking rather than a pizza!). Yup, if the dough sticks to the peel AT ALL, EDGE SOME SEMOLINA UNDER THE PROBLEMATIC PART UNTIL IT DOES NOT STICK ANY LONGER!!

3. Drip olive oil over the dough and spread it evenly with your fingers. Next, swirl a bit of tomato sauce over surface and thinly spread. Quickly assemble your preferred toppings. KEEP TOPPINGS LIGHT! Then transfer to pizza stone in maxed-out pre-heated oven.

4. Bake about 8 mins (note: the thicker the dough and spread of toppings, the longer it will take to bake; I like thin crust pizzas lightly topped, so mine only take 8 mins @ 250C).

5. I like to serve mine with freshly ground black pepper, and scattered with torn basil leaves, with some chopped fresh chillies in quality extra virgin olive oil spooned over.

Toppings:
See: Making Your Own GREAT Pizzas At Home.

And remember, for thin-crust traditional-style pizzas, LESS IS MORE. Load the toppings on and you risk ending up with a soggy, half-cooked pizza. Bake it longer to compensate, and the rim will be over-baked and too brittle.

I don’t take great pics – too impatient to start eating! These don’t do justice to these pizzas, but will give some idea of the way they turn out (NB: I don’t even try to char mine – that’s best left for high-temp wood-fired or pro ovens). And unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to taking a crumb shot showing just how light and airy these sourdough pizza bases are.

Yes, the degree of difficulty of these pizzas is higher than that of the dry yeast versions. Yes, the time involved is days, not hours. And yes – it is worth the extra effort!

I don’t see myself going back to dry yeast pizza dough, but there is a short-cut alternative for those who might baulk at beginning a wild yeast starter culture just to make pizzas: a biga or poolish, which is basically a starter made using commercial yeast (dry or compressed).

Whether you use a natural or commercial yeast pre-ferment, the secret to more complex, developed flavours is to retard fermentation of the dough overnight or longer in the fridge.

I’m not much interested in exploring the use of a commercial yeast biga. Why would I be, when I have a gloriously active wild yeast starter that I fawn over like a pet and that serves me so well? As ever, though, the choice is yours. Just don’t harbour the delusion (as I did before I knew better) that those dry yeast pizza bases are as good as it gets – they ain’t!

Sourdough pizzas are top of the wozzer. Try ‘em!

Related Posts:

This post is a presentation of the essentials of sourdough bread baking, a collation of information I’ve acquired through months of inhabiting artisan bread baking forums, reading books by the bread gurus and – most important of all – trying many different sourdough bread recipes. Consider it a short-cut to your own wide wonderful world of artisan sourdough bread baking at home. Hopefully, I’ve included everything you need to know to get started.

If you haven’t been following this series of blogs on the sourdough bread movement, you might like to check out my previous post and have a listen to the ABC Regional Radio podcast embedded therein. Compelling stuff.

But why bother with home baked sourdough bread, you might ask, when there are now sourdough bakeries aplenty? That’s a question that could yield a book, but I’ll cut to the chase.

The Basics of Sourdough Bread Baking
OK, to business. How do you get started? With a starter!

The Starter
A starter is a wild yeast culture made from flour and water. Once it’s active, you can keep it in the fridge between bakes. Take it out and feed it up when you’re planning to make bread. Then put it back in the fridge. Or, if you’re baking very regularly, just keep it out and fed.

There are numerous ways to begin a starter. It took me some time and a few methods to get mine going. It was mid-winter, and I blamed my first failed attempts on the cold ambient temperatures (12-18C in kitchen). As it turned out, the temperature was not a factor – my refined fine-ground rye flour was. As soon as I switched to quality organic whole-grain rye flour in combination with plain white flour, voila!

Here’s the method that was successful for me: How To Make Your Own Starter
(by SourDom, one of the regular contributors on the excellent Sourdough Companion site)

Follow the directions, use 30% organic whole-grain rye + 70% plain flour, and you’ll have an active starter in 10–15 days, or less in warm weather (NB: you’ll need to increase the feeds to every 8 hours if your kitchen temperature is very warm – say, 28C+).

Don’t be impatient, as I was. I was so eager to get going, I convinced myself that a few bubbles and an acetone-like smell were signs that my starter was ready. It was not. Without enough healthy yeast to leaven the dough, it won’t rise and your bread will be compact and flat. Ah dammit, here’s a pic of my inglorious first bread attempt – known in baking circles as…

…a ‘brick’!



Here’s the starter that I mistakenly assessed as ready for duty:

Here’s the same starter a few days later, this time fluffed up with healthy yeasty activity and genuinely raring to go:

And the result? My first real bread:

If you’re not sure your starter is ready, it probably isn’t. The signs of an active starter are unmistakable and obvious: it will double in size, or more, within 8-12 hours (maybe up to 16 hours in very cold conditions), be light and mousse-like in texture, and aerated with bubbles.

Where does the yeast come from?
Debate rages endlessly. Some insist that yeast spores are floating around in the air, others that they are in the flour. The latter explanation has scientific backing. Me? I don’t care. It’s romantic to think that the yeast spores you invoke when you begin your starter are the same ones that the ancients used to make the very first breads, borne in the air down through the centuries, but my money’s on the scientists. Whatever, this really is a case of ‘build it and they will come.’ For me that’s magical, wherever the little beasties heil from.



Equipment
Some folk use expensive electric mixers, but I mix all my dough by hand (using a dinner knife to stir). And whatever recipes might specify, I’ve never encountered a dough that couldn’t be hand-mixed. So, up to you, but I wouldn’t be buying a Kitchen Aid or similar. All you need is:

That’s it! You can spend more if you like. Bannetons, brotforms, couche linen and other professional bakery equipment give panache to your breads, but you can get by perfectly well without them.



Ingredients
Flour
I prefer premium quality organic flours. You can afford the best as a home baker, but it’s not about bucks for me. I love quality flavoursome breads. Why would I compromise flavour, or my own baking, by using supermarket flour? You can if you choose, though. It will work fine, and you’ll still be turning out far better bread than you can buy from most commercial bakeries (or from many boutique sourdough bakeries!). It just won’t be as good as it could be…and that’s unbearable for people like me.

You’ll need a variety of flours. Start with a basic store of the following:

As you get more adventurous in your bread baking, you’ll probably want to seek out some spelt flour, durum semolina, barley flour, oat flour…the list goes on.

Water
Any potable tap water will suffice, but I prefer to use filtered water.

Salt
I use cheap sea salt (‘cooking salt’), without iodine or anything else added to it.



Some Bread Baking Terminology
Don’t get spooked by the jargon. You’ll pick it up bit by bit as you engage in the artisan bread baker forums, but here’s a short list that might help initially:

Shaping
When I began baking bread, I didn’t pay any attention to shaping. After the bulk proof, I would just dump the dough into a bread pan, pat it benevolently to even up the surface, and that was that. If I was making a boule (round loaf), I’d form the dough into a ball with cupped hands and transfer it to a plastic-bag-lined round casserole bowl. I soon learned that the result of not shaping your dough properly is often a very irregular crumb with wonky features you don’t want – such as tunnels and caves. Here’s a video demonstrating correct shaping techniques (there are lots more, covering any shape of loaf you might wish to make – do a search):

Once you’ve shaped your dough, you need some sort of mould to put it in that will retain the shape you’ve so lovingly given it while it proves. Pros and perfectionist home bakers use bannetons, brotforms, baskets and couche linen, which I see as a needless expense, since I’m happy with my breads having a rustic look. In the best tradition of the home baker, I improvise with teatowels, colanders, baking paper, bricks or blocks of wood – whatever works! If you are interested in my home-grown strategies to overcome a lack of pro equipment, let me know in the Comments (no private emails, please) and I’ll do a follow-up post on this.



Recipes
As mentioned, almost all the recipes I’ve tried have been courtesy of amateur artisan bread bakers posting on bread baking forums. There really is no need to buy books if all you’re after is recipes. There are some very well-resourced and skilful home bakers out there, who are ever-willing to share their knowledge. Peruse some of the many artisan bread blogs or forums and you’ll find any number of tantalising recipes, some based on classic breads made famous by acclaimed professional bakers, some developed by the posters themselves.

Here’s a good one to start with; it’s an easy dough to work with and the bread is one of my favourites:
Norwich Sourdough Bread

Every Friday, breadheads submit pics of their latest baking triumphs to YeastSpotting! – something of an institution among home bakers. Well worth checking, as the pics are usually linked to the posters’ recipes.

Below are links to my favourite artisan bread blogs and forums. Google and you’ll find many more. And although you don’t need to splash out on books, you’ll probably want to read the gurus once full-blown bread-baking addiction begins to take hold – see recommended texts below.



Recommended Resources

Websites/blogs:
Bread cetera
Farine
Sourdough Companion
The Fresh Loaf
Wild Yeast



Bread Baking Books:

Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes

This expansive work of Hamelman’s is widely acclaimed as the bread ‘bible’. Written for professional and amateur bakers, it is detailed and technical at times, and many of the recipes are not sourdough based. Nevertheless, Hamelman’s writing is a joy, and this hard-cover classic is highly recommended for anyone seriously into artisan bread baking.




The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread

Peter Reinhart is another of the American gurus whose name and recipes come up all the time on artisan bread forums. This is his seminal text, and is well worth having. As with Hamelman, extremely well written. Gorgeous photographs. Again, though, only a minority of the recipes are sourdough.




The Handmade Loaf

Lepard is English, and the breads he covers are all European in origin. Makes for interesting reading and the photography is choice. Some good sourdough recipes, although most call for commercial yeast. His ale barm bread is one of my favourites. This book is far simpler in its treatment than the others I’ve recommended here, and more directly geared to the home baker. A good one to start with.

Note: If you’re Australian-based, you’ll find that these books are available from Amazon at prices way lower than those local retailers are asking. As always, the more you order at one time, the cheaper the shipping works out. And yes, the above are affiliate links, which means I get a small commission if you click on them and then order. I refuse to monetise this blog with Google Adwords etc, but given the ridiculous amount of time I’ve put into this post I felt justified in embedding these Amazon affiliate links on this occasion. But go ahead and bypass them if you wish to order without dropping a few miserable shekels in my begging bowl. Your karma…

I have bought all my bread books through Amazon, with the exception of Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, for which I got a better deal through the UK online seller, The Book Depository. It’s worth checking their prices against Amazon’s, as they have free shipping. Most of the time, their prices are much higher for US published books, though, even factoring in Amazon’s shipping charges.

There you go then. Everything you need to get started. What are you waiting for?

Related Posts:

I used to love family holidays as a kid. Every year, we’d drive down to Busselton and stay at a cottage in a beach-front ‘resort’ called Glenleigh, named after the owner’s daughters (yep, Glen and Leigh). They were enchanted summers. The old steam train in the park we’d clamber over until we became too old yet eyed off with enduring affection every time we passed it, the best pies I have ever tasted (still!), that endless mythic jetty, drive-in movies, raspberry squashes in frosty pilsener glasses from the Ship Hotel, and of course, sun sun sun, sand sand sand, sea sea sea…these are cherished memories.

If this post was about those good ol’ days at Busselton, I could rattle away effortlessly for hours. But it’s not, so I won’t. Besides, it wasn’t all good.

There were the hated swimming lessons, and stingers that invaded the bay in such numbers as to ruin the beach on some days. There were family squabbles and annoying excursions to scenic locales that I saw as merely depriving us of valuable time at the seaside. The worst aspect of these outings was lunchtime. Never was one for sitting on rugs on the gravelly ground of some national park BBQ area, battling swarming flies and resentful bull ants while my unappreciated and often irritated mother doled out her elaborately prepared esky tucker. So irksome were these outings to me that I ended up with “issues” about picnics and families that remain to this day.

One of the few upsides to those dreaded family excursions was the bread we’d buy in the then tiny towns of Dunsborough, Bridgetown and Augusta. Read the rest…

I watched a doco on TV recently on the erratic but – to my mind – much under-rated 60s UK band, The Small Faces. Their 1968 ‘concept’ album Ogden’s Nutgone Flake, a psychedelic rock classic, was one of the first albums I bought. I still treasure this unique work – for the great music, the warped and inspired narrative in “Unwinese” by Stanley Unwin, and the eccentric fold-out tobacco tin cover (in good nick, this album is now a prize collectors’ item fetching $300+ …but I’d never sell mine).

One of my favourite tracks is Song Of A Baker. Strange, but in all the times I’ve listened to this song, I’d never really pondered on the lyrics until the TV doco – even though I know them by heart: Read the rest…

Here they are again. Random, disorganised, informed by personal prejudice…just how you like it. Yes you do. YES, you DO!

Right, now that that’s established, are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botties? Then I’ll begin…

2009 Boomtown Rap Free-to-air TV Awards: The BR Bogeys

Pet Semetary Award: Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Whose idea was it to dig this rotting cadaver up, give it mouth-to-mouth and send it lurching back to TV land? I never could understand the popularity of Hey Hey even back in its halcyon days, but what do I know – exhuming it was a ratings winner. Daryl Somers proved there is plenty to eat in the afterlife. Other than that, what to say except thank God for the blackface ‘Red Faces’ skit – anything that riles Harry Connick Jnr gets my tick of approval.

Family Show of the Year: John Safran’s Race Relations. This is confessional comedy taken to its limits (until the next Safran outing). Read the rest…

It’s hot, I’ve been eating and drinking too much for too many days in succession, and I’m in lazy holiday mode. I don’t feel like banging out a review, but I just can’t let this movie pass without comment, so here goes. Last review for the year, short and sweet.

Up In The Air opens with a series of aerial shots of US cities that, in hindsight, sums up the perspective of the lead character, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). Bingham is a high flyer, literally and figuratively. A corporate downsizing specialist enjoying boom times courtesy of the GFC, he spends most of his year in transit, flying all over the States to expertly perform the task bosses shirk from – firing staff. A doity job, but someone’s gotta do it, and there’s no one better at it than Bingham. Read the rest…

This new, much anticipated film of Peter Jackson’s starts promisingly enough. Take a run-of-the-mill suburban American family circa early 70s – accountant dad (Mark Wahlberg), well-groomed mom (Rachel Weisz), two daughters (Susie – Saoirse Ronan; Lindsey – Rose McIver), neat house in a typical suburban neighbourhood – then drop into this unremarkable mix a dramatic and shocking voiceover revelation from the oldest daughter (taken verbatim from the Alice Sebold novel upon which the film is based):
“My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973.”

Blast-off! Cold chills, intrigue…we’re on our way!

There’s no doubting this is a good premise: a dead protagonist narrating the story of her murder and its aftermath. Plenty of dramatic scope here to explore the effects of grief on the family – and on Susie, whose violent and untimely death has left her with a swag of issues post-mortem. She must come to terms with her savage disengagement from her mortal coil, with her sense of bewilderment in the afterlife, with her powerlessness as she watches her family in the throes of mourning while her killer (creepily played by Stanley Tucci) escapes justice. Oh, not to mention witnessing her teen crush, Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), slowly letting go of her memory and moving on to another girl, classmate Ruth Conners (Carolyn Dando).

Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of the premise is never realised. Read the rest…

Back in the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, I recall a leftie friend blazing away with extreme anti-American rhetoric: “It’s the Yanks who are the terrorists…Bush is the dictator, not Saddam…blah blah…”

Well, although I agreed to an extent, the extremity of statements like these, the sheer lack of balance in lashing one side while ignoring the dark deeds of the other, irks me. Raves like this tap into what I hate about politics, and in particular, political idealism: otherwise tolerant and rational people become raging bigots, hypocrites, selective misanthropes, and worst of all, utterly righteous in their views and dismissive – personally damning, even – of those whose perspectives may differ from theirs. There is no hope of meaningful discourse with such people, no potential for learning.

As Madame Leftie raved on, I maintained a bland facade, containing the head of steam that was beginning to build – that is, until her declaration that “these American soldiers are nothing less than murderers and war criminals.” Read the rest…

Critics go apeshit over Almodóvar. As one of the canonised contemporary directors, a darling of the arthouse set, he begins each new film with a surplus of critical credit points. No surprise, then, that there are some raves for Broken Embraces. Whack on a genius label and many will see genius regardless of the product. The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome is in there, but so too, I think, is a fear among critics of showing up as less than discerning. Gotta preserve yer status as informed and sophisticated film buffs, dontcha? Read the rest…

The cinema was packed, and there was a buzz about the crowd – as you would expect at a pre-release viewing of a new Coen brothers movie.

The Coen boys have long been my favourite writer/directors. You know you’re in for a ride that is going to take you somewhere you haven’t been before. That there will be none of the usual Hollywood signposting, no comfortable formulae to fall back on. That however unfamiliar, however downright weird, wacky, off-beat the course they pursue and the terrain they explore, these drivers know their vehicle. So you strap yourself in and trust them to deliver. And almost always, they do.

Not this time. Not for me, at least. I just couldn’t get on to where the hell they were going with A Serious Man, and by around the half way mark, I didn’t really care. They’d worn me down to a point of fatigue that was hard to fight against. Bored in a Coen brothers movie? Afraid so. Read the rest…