Great Yeastery

I love good food.  I love to cook and am pretty good at it.  But I’ve always been afraid of baking bread.

First of all, the nature of yeast is confounding.  Animal?  Vegetable?  Sea monkey?  We didn’t do much real baking at our house, so the yeast packets were written in Aramaic.  This should’ve been the first indicator of death, but who thinks about little grains of stinky sand as being alive in the first place?  Even if the leavening was hale and hearty, I worried about the exact temperature of lukewarm.  FYI, there is no ‘lukewarm’ indicator on a baby thermometer, which was older than me and probably didn’t work anyway.  Proofing?  Strange little verb.  Chances are, I either cooked the rascals before they could start farting into my dough, or froze their non-existent nuts off.

Since the yeast was probably DOA, there was little rising and no real ‘punching down’ to be done.  Kneading was a fun activity but I had no idea what should be happening or what to look for.  No matter what I tried, every attempt came out like a lump of dysmorphic building material.  Even the frozen dumbshit-proof Rhodes bread would break any plate or knife unlucky enough to wander into its gravitational pull.  I was panne morte.  Bread Dead.

And then I was given a new bible: Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes a Day.

My pal Seana promised success.  No matter how clearly I cataloged my failures, she was positive I could do this.  I finally agreed, assuring her that I’d still love her.  Well… once I got over the abject despair, at any rate.

So I read the first few chapters, invested in some tools (a good baking stone, pizza peel, scraper/cutter thingie, oven thermometer), along with some fresh flour and yeast.  It didn’t all make sense in my head, but I stopped asking questions about how and why and simply followed the steps.  About an hour later, I had a crackly golden orb of deliciousness resting on my cooling rack.  I checked every few minutes until it was cool enough to handle; I couldn’t wait to cut into the damned thing.  Sure enough, the crust had that light cracker-snappy feel.  A little chip even flung up into my eye just like the real baguettes from Grand Central!!  The crumb (inside stuff) was lush — if a bit more dense than I prefer.  This was delicious and sandwich-ready, but I like the big air pockets with a slightly more toothsome feel.  Out of nowhere comes this wise old bread voice saying, “the dough should be wetter next time.”  I felt like the Scarecrow when he finally got that stupid diploma.  ‘As the bread bakes, trapped water turns to steam and generates pockets with volume equal to the square root of an isosceles triangle!’  Eureka!!  Wetter dough!  I learned that from the book!!

I’ve successfully baked up a fresh loaf every couple of days, all from that first batch I made.  And I started a new — wetter — batch that I’ll try out tonight.  I’ll reach into the bucket in my fridge, pull out a gooey handful, make some balloon animal shape, rest it for about 40 minutes, put it in the oven, and will have fresh homemade bread half an hour later.  Yes, it’s ridiculous, but I can’t explain how freakin’ gratifying it is.  I made BREAD!  I conquered my culinary nemesis.  Every day I draw pretty pictures using state-of-the-art software and decode the Internet genome and make technology quiver and cry at my feet, but today I made BREAD.

I am Woman.  Hear me mother-effin roar!