On Baking Bread
I’ve assembled the ingredients: flour, yeast, honey, oats; also mixing bowls, bread pans, wooden spoon. I’ve selected the music (Billy Holiday) and the wine (an Oregon pinot noir). Having baked for over 20 years there’s no need for recipes or measuring cups, no need for timers. Baking bread, it turns out, one more metaphor for life.
With a pair of scissors, I open a packet of dried yeast and sprinkle it into a ¼ cup of lukewarm water. I don’t believe in magic, but this is getting close. The tiny brown pellets are the exact size of periods on a page, colored like the deer that come into my yard. Stirring the yeast into the water there’s always an element of doubt. Is the water too hot? Did I kill the yeast? Then, just when I think I should try again, there it is! The first tiny explosion, a subaqueous eruption, and soon it’s a whole set of explosions, a carpet bombing on the bottom of the bowl, a beautiful violence.
Baking bread—there’s no app for it. I like the old-world processes involved, the physical punching and kneading of the dough, the antiquity. I use the sponge method, mixing part of the flour, honey and all the liquid and letting this rise first. Tilting the ceramic mixing bowl on edge, I stir the flour, powdered milk and water into a thick batter, at the end lifting and dropping the large wooden spoon, almost chopping with it. When done, I cover the bowl with a damp cloth and place it in a warm high place to rise.
Forty minutes later the sponge has risen and it is time to knead the dough, but first I add the oil and salt, the oats, and the rest of the flour. When it forms a ball, I turn it out onto a floured board, pressing the young dough with the heels of my palms, spinning it 90 degrees, folding it in on itself and pressing again. Press spin fold press. Press spin fold press. There’s no break between the actions and it becomes a single unthinking thing:
pressspinfoldpressspressspinfoldpressspressspinfoldpresssspressspin.
When a strand of hair falls in my face, I brush it back with the back of my hand, and every so often I pause to take another sip of wine. There’s all kinds of ecstasy in the world, all manner of bliss. When I’m done kneading, I lift the ball of dough to my nose and inhale.
While the dough rises a second time, I retire to the living room where the cats are practicing their naps. I make sure the wine disappears. Some things, it should be noted, never change, and baking bread is about the never change. It is about the spaces of time between risings, when things get done, or they don’t. It is about not being in a rush.
When the dough has doubled in size, I punch it down—a single guilt-ridden blow—the dough deflating like a punctured tire. I pound it again, six times now, punching the air out of it. This kind dough, this lovely dough, it doesn’t deserve such treatment. A few quick kneads and I slice the melon-sized ball in two and form the loaves then place them in their oiled, cast iron pans.
Now the loaves are in the oven, rising in those pans, muscling up out of those two, too narrow pans, and I’m on the couch, the whole great weight of the afternoon a blanket upon me. Absently, I turn a page. Absently, I take another sip of wine. We are here, it is my firm belief, to do what is right and good. When the brown aroma fills the room I get up, open the oven door and tap the tops of the loaves. Ten minutes. Ten more eternal minutes.
When the loaves out of the oven I turn them onto wire racks. They are swollen, golden brown, white where flecks of oats break through. Art, I say it here and now, for the record: it’s not just what you hang on the walls. So it is that today I am the baker of bread: proud creator, simple man. Look at me sawing the crust. See the butter melting.
End.