Segment #1 - Methods, Metaphors, and Musings on Bread Baking

These past two Saturdays, we’ve tried our hands at making Ciabatta loaves using the long and involved processes in Baking by Hand by Andy and Jackie King. They started a neat, local bakery in Salem, MA called A & J King Artisan Bakers that has become a favorite of ours.
During the long hours of the baking process, we have exchanged a few playful metaphors that morphed into what we consider to be a delicious perspective on bread making. Here they are! Enjoy and create your own.

Learning Tenderness with the Dough
Touch the dough: it is soft, living, and breathing. It swells into a smooth roll when our heads are turned. Press on it with a finger and it will hold the print, slowly softening it. I carry the lump solemnly in the bowl as though it is a balloon bulging with water or a small sleeping animal. I tuck it in dish-towel blankets. We are impatient, eager, hungry for toast, but let the long hours of rising and proofing teach us gentility. The taste will be better and more satisfying at the end. The smell of yeast and fresh bread will linger for hours until it becomes the smell of the house and the yard, and everyone will want to stop by.

An Art
Treating the process of making bread like an art cuts against the grain in our society that plainly states, “Food serves a purpose.” Is culinary art in the home a lost art—with prepared goods just a drive away? I think crafting bread can be like throwing clay:  as a kiln, like an oven, makes its shape permanent. There are just a few key ingredients and endless possibilities. There is an ounce of uncertainty as you slash your shaped dough and wonder how it will expand. Is it worth it to make it yourself? What about a bread-making machine or a premade mix? Can time and effort make this art more precious?

A Rhythm
We carry the dough—a shaggy lump in a mixing bowl—from the cold kitchen counter to the warm spot in front of the fire-place. We wait for half an hour, sometimes an hour, and the cycle of shaping and waiting begins afresh. Mixing a starter, measuring, kneading, shaping, waiting, proofing, and finally baking in a humid oven can take about eighteen hours. The longer the resting period, the fuller and more complex the dough.
We think of rhythm in music as those intervals where we hear notes and noise, where we tap our feet. But those intervals between the notes, those quiet pauses, are just as vital. A simple scale, with rests inserted, becomes a rich melody. A bubbly, active yeast with spaces of quiet in a warm spot, becomes a developed loaf. The butter can melt into the crevices that were once bubbles.

A Contractor’s Delight
I think about store bought bread—a rectangular prism—pre-sliced evenly: is this bread that has reached perfection? Far from it! A baker begs, “Who will see my bread with the life and soul it is made with?” Is it the bread-making factory worker—the one that presses a button to produce in mass-quantity, whose job oversees one small process (perhaps the mixing, the baking, the slicing, the packaging)? Her hands do not hold the loaf. I doubt she will return home ten years from now energized by the process of making the food. Instead, a baker is like a contractor whose work is not complete until both the process and product are her own. What a gift to be able to see the loaf full to completion and, not unlike the building of a house, to rest in its completion.

A Story
Baking bread is like a story with an arc—a process, a product, and a reward. And the story, depending on how you tell it, has origins outside our control. Wheat flour’s story begins with the sun’s life-giving rays; a farmer waits for rain; wheat is threshed from its chaff and ground into flour; then packagers, delivery men, and lastly, a supermarket. Yeast, having a life of its own, waits to feast on the dough, wondering why such a delicious meal needs to be baked in the first place. The process of baking itself is a long, steady work of collaboration, with a beginning (a starter), a middle (dough in process), and an end (a loaf to be enjoyed). As we invite each ingredient to come together, we play the final roles in the story: the artful mixing, waiting, kneading, baking, slicing, buttering, munching. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this life-giving taste is a million.

Learning Fellowship in It All
If you set aside these six or more precious hours in the day, make sure that you are doing it with someone who brings hope and lightness to your step, who is more patient that you are. That person will help you to remember to be gentle to the living lump of flour. You will take turns folding the dough into a neat, soft, little package: one of you with thorough and forceful strength, one of you with lightness and busyness. Both are important. Watch each other carefully and learn. Fry some eggs at the end and eat them together with the too-hot bread. You will laugh at how satisfied you are.