The rendering time

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on December 30, 2015.

Last year, I went through a period in which I was baking a lot of bread at home, initially as an activity to share with my daughter. Not surprisingly, I relied entirely on the no-knead recipe first developed by Jim Lahey and popularized by Mark Bittman over a decade ago in the New York Times. As many amateur bakers know, it’s simplicity itself: instead of kneading, you mix a very wet dough with a tiny amount of yeast, and then let it rise for about eighteen hours. Bittman quotes Harold McGee, author of the legendary tome On Food and Cooking, who says:

It makes sense. The long, slow rise does over hours what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network. The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.

Bittman continues: “Mr. McGee said he had been kneading less and less as the years have gone by, relying on time to do the work for him.” And the results, I can confirm, are close to foolproof: even if you’re less than precise or make a few mistakes along the way, as I tend to do, you almost always get a delicious, light, crusty loaf.

And the idea that you can use the power of time to achieve results that would otherwise require intensive work is central to much of modernist cuisine, as the freelance food scientist Nathan Myhrvold notes in his massive book of the same name. Government food safety guidelines, he points out, are based on raising the core temperature of meat to a certain minimum, which is often set unreasonably high to account for different cooking styles and impatient chefs. In reality, most pathogens are killed by temperatures as low as 120 degrees Fahrenheit—but only if the food has been allowed to cook for a sufficient length of time. The idea that a lower temperature can be counterbalanced by a longer time is the basic premise behind sous vide, in which food is cooked in a warm water bath for hours rather than more rapidly over high heat. This works because you’re trading one kind of precision for another: the temperature is carefully controlled over the course of the cooking process, but once you’re past a certain point, you can be less precise about the time. If you’ve ever prepared a meal in a crock pot, you already know this, and the marvel of sous vide lies in how it applies the same basic insight to a wider variety of recipes. (In fact, there’s a little gadget that you can buy for less than a hundred dollars that can convert any crock pot into a sous vide machine, and although I haven’t bought one for myself yet, I intend to try it one of these days.)

But the relationship between intensity and time has applications far beyond the kitchen. Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the rendering time that all creative acts seem to require: it seems that you just have to live with a work of art for a certain period, and if your process has become more efficient, you still fill that time by rendering or revising the work. As Blinn’s Law states: “As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.” And rendering, of course, is also a term from the food industry, in which the inedible waste from the butcher shop is converted, using time and heat, into something useful or delicious. But one lesson that artists quickly learn is that time can be used in place of intensity, as well as the other way around. Many of the writing rules that I try to follow—trim ten percent from each draft, cut the beginning and ending of every scene, overlap the action, remove transitional moments—are tricks to circumvent a protracted revision process, with intense work and scrutiny over a focused window taking the place of a longer, less structured engagement. If I just sat and fiddled with the story for months or years, I’d probably end up making most of the same changes, but I use these rules of thumb to hurry up the revisions that I would have made anyway. They aren’t always right, and they can’t entirely take the place of an extended period of living with a story, but I can rely on them to get maybe ninety percent of the way there, and the time I save more than compensates for that initial expenditure of energy.

And art, like cooking, often consists of finding the right balance between time and intensity. I’ve found that I write best in bursts of focused activity, which is why I try to keep my total working time for a short story to a couple of weeks or so. But I’ve also learned to set the resulting draft aside for a while before the final revision and submission, which allows me to subconsciously work through the remaining problems and find any plot holes. (On a few occasions that I haven’t done this, I’ve submitted a story only to realize within a day or two that I’d overlooked something important.) The amount of real work I do remains the same, but like dough rising quietly on the countertop, the story has time to align itself in my brain while I’m occupied with other matters. And while time can do wonders for any work of art, the few good tricks I use to speed up the process are still necessary: you aren’t likely to give up on your dough just because it takes an extra day to rise, but the difference between a novel that takes twelve months to write and one that takes three years often amounts to one you finish and one you abandon. The proper balance depends on many outside factors, and you may find that greater intensity and less time, or vice versa, is the approach you need to make it fit with everything else in your life. But baking no-knead bread reminded me that we have a surprising amount of control over the relationship between the two. And even though I’m no longer baking much these days, I’m always thinking about what I can set to rise, or render, right now.