I hadn’t baked bread in years. The last yeast bread that proofed in my kitchen were some sweet rolls that my daughter and I made for Christmas morning breakfast some 15 or so years ago. Yes, there have been many quick breads produced in my ovens – biscuits, scones, fruit breads – but yeast breads have been scarce. In my mind, bread means yeast, wild or purchased, bread isn’t bread without it. Having accepted that as my definition of bread, and the requirements of the leavening – the time necessary for risings, etc. – homemade yeast breads have been in the luxury (of time) category in this house.
It’s funny how mutable time is. Once, when I was much younger and working full-time with full-time children and spouse, I baked bread every week, sometimes twice a week. Someone had given me a sour dough starter and it seemed such a friendly thing to do that I started baking just to have some to give to others. The bread was wonderful. We ate thick slabs of it hot out of the oven slathered with butter. I made so much that I gave it to my neighbors. It was soul satisfying.
The sourdough bread experience led to baking other breads. One favorite recipe was called Cornell formula bread, which I believed to have magical health qualities, especially when I drove all the way to New Hope to buy stone-milled specialty flours to add to the mutable ‘formula.” I experimented with exotic breads, even the flat breads of the Middle East. We ate well. This may be why I had to join Weight Watchers many times over during the ensuing decades.
It is so elegantly simple to make bread. Both the process and the ingredients are elemental. Bread requires four ingredients: flour, yeast, salt and water. Yesterday I made bread enhanced by spelt flour. Spelt is an ancient grain, cultivated before wheat. It has a fabulous nutty flavor. The cake yeast I used was dissolved in tepid water, to which I added, off recipe, a bit of sugar, a treat for the yeast. Yeast is a living organism. Once classified as a plant akin to bacteria, it is a fungus, albeit a good one, that multiplies to create the wonders of things like bread, beer, wine and such. As in all baking, there is a chemistry to the process requiring some exactitude. The yeast works if the water temperature is correct and if it is not too old and, while there are specific amounts of flour and water, each has to be adjusted as you work the dough to accommodate the individual nature of the flour and the environment in which the dough is being worked.
After all these years, my hands still remembered when and how much additional flour was needed, how to knead and when to stop. It amazed me that I almost instinctively knew when the rising dough had reached its peak. Was it my own experience or was it the memories of long-ago days as I watched my grandmother make bread? In the end, it didn’t matter; it felt so natural to be doing it again.
The kitchen smelled fabulous as the bread baked. The round loaf had a hard, crisply delicious crust. The interior was smooth, succulently nutty with the addition of the spelt and its seductive nature had me carving tiny pieces all afternoon until the current need to account for my snacking to my on-line Weight Watchers account forced me to wrap the loaf in several revered old tea towels that I inherited from my mother and grandmother. It seemed only right that my newest creation be so importantly swathed.
The bread baking made me feel useful. Its simplicity, its primeval process and materials unchanged, even now, gave me great joy. Sometimes, when the ordinariness of life, the pace of change categorizes what you know, what you have learned, as obsolete, when the day-to-day, no-brains-needed and no-one-notices stuff that you do leaves you feeling less, the process and product of flour, salt, yeast and water gives you pause.
Is it not an ordinary thing to make bread? It is one of the easiest skills to acquire and remember, but it is beautiful, because it remains unchanged over millennia, speaking to the nature of its elements, reminding you the beauty of life can be sometimes found in the ordinary, the everyday.
