Baking and Why I Like It

Baking the bread at Sunny-side is one of my favorite things to do. I've been doing it for four years and what I like about it is...well, pretty much everything; every step has its pleasures. 

I like choosing out what sort of bread to make--wheat or sourdough or white or rye; this makes me feel powerful as a potentate. I like marshaling my forces (the bread pans, the measuring cups and spoons, the yeast and flour and milk and eggs) and laying them all out on the counter. I lay them out in a homey, ad hoc array. It's all very reminiscent of a mechanics' convention or old time town hall meeting. And all of this makes me feel like the affectionate master of my elements.  

I like preheating the oven, especially in the winter time, when the extra heat just warms the house. 

I enjoy the work of measuring, which is all very scientific and precise, and then I like mixing up the dough with a wooden spoon. Wooden spoons are the best kind of spoon. Exposed to season after season of culinary weather, they chip and nick and burn and stain, acquiring soul. 

I especially enjoy the work of kneading, which I do always by hand. Some kinds of dough are more pleasurable to work with than others, but there's always something manly and muscular about the business. The work reminds me of mixing cement or of performing emergency chest pumps in CPR, preferably on Romola Garai. Yes sir, I'm a layer-down of durable walkways, and a ready rescuer of Romola, yup that's me.

Once the dough is vitally alive with kneading (a good ten minutes or so) I deposit it in a metal bowl that used to be my mother's, and lay a damp lime-green linen-cloth over the bowl and set it in some warm place: the sun porch on the carpet when the sun shines in is a favorite selection of mine. There. Now I can enjoy waiting for the dough to rise. During this waiting period I'm like a pharaoh watching his pyramid rise to the triangular tip or like Shah Jahan watching the Taj Mahal bubble into beauty, because you're letting millions of little organisms of yeast do the slave work for you, of constructing the eventual texture of the bread, while you just sit back and watch the movie of life. 

When the dough has doubled in size (say after an hour) I lift the damp towel off of the bowl, performing as they say, a reveal. The dough is speckled with grains. The dough is fragrant. The dough is (to say it again) literally alive, a glory-globe of microbial life. The dough is also ready to be punched. And I really, really like punching down the dough, because this act is allegorical of the vicissitudes of fortune, reminding us as it does of the necessity of persistence in all our actions. Punch. "Listen Kid, one rise is not good enough. Nothing worth doing comes without the experience of failure and impediments." Punch. "No you gotta get your nose broken and your ego de-boosted. You need (punch) busting up. You need no helmet. And don't let any namby-pamby, feel-good, just-whine-to-me, self-esteemy (punch) psychologist tell you otherwise; nope, get back in that pan, stick with it, rise up, and make yourself into your own grainy you!"

I like rolling out the dough on the counter-top with my roller. I like taking this dough and shaping it into loaves as if I were a rough pagan god doing a little man-making, and I like slipping these doughy loaves slug-like into my well-greased pans. Then after a second rise of shorter duration, when the tops of the loaves are just peeking above the edges of the pans, I definitely enjoy maybe slashing the tops of the loaves with a knife, like an outlaw slashing some tires; this gives the final product a rough peasant look. Else maybe I'll paint the loaves with egg yolk, which imparts a shiny shellac to the same final product, which in turn impresses people for very little effort. Heck the rough peasant look impresses people too, and all you have to do is slash. 

But now it's time. Time to slide the loaves into the oven like sarcophagi, which I'm telling you is a vastly appropriate simile I've imported from ancient Egypt, because this is the big step in the process, when the life of the yeast and the sum of the life of the grains and milk and whatever other past life has gone into the dough is baked into the bread and everything is preserved for the use of our own human bodies; it's a transformation of extraordinary meaning, comparable to embalming, which after all, is nothing more or less than a means the dead have been given of traveling onward, in this case into the realms of consciousness--and specifically human consciousness, which so far as we know is about the most conscious consciousness that there is! Do you see what I'm saying? The ingredients of bread have to die before they can take part in our life; but this new life that they participate in by means of their death is a life that includes the miracle of consciousness. Heck, a bit of French bread once fed the man who said "I think, therefore I am." 

Well a half hour to forty five minutes is usually about the time it takes to perform the baking, and now that the loaves are probably baked, I slide them out of the oven and turn them out of their loaf-pans and (listening carefully) tap them on the underside like an old-fashioned internist sounding the body cavities for health. If the loaf sounds hollow, it's done. Tap tap. Yup, done for sure. Good now we can take the loaves and set them side by side on a wire rack to cool. There they are: comestible ingots, weighty with nourishment; arrangements of sustenance, bought with time. And now while they're cooling let's go outside for a few minutes before reentering the house for a sniff. Why outside first? Well, dessert is best enjoyed when the table is cleared, and the same goes for enjoying the smell of fresh bread; you have to precede the deep in-sniff with physical displacement elsewhere. (I call it Harlan's Reset Law of Nostrils, or HRLN.)

So come outside with me and help me trim the quince (it needs it) and maybe fill the bird feeder with sunflower seed. And maybe just sit with me now out here on Sunny-side's stoop, soaking in the maples changing to October flame and the neighbor kids riding their bikes and just the general absolute weirdness and wonder of being here on planet Earth with hummingbirds and books of Kierkegaard.

Okay, time to head back in.

There, you smell that? Sweet as a bouquet of summer flowers. Only it's not flowers, it's bread. It's the life of the earth embalmed now for our mindful use. 

(And yes the bread is done. A little more cooling and it's ready to be sliced and enjoyed and digested, in somewhat the same way as people used to take knives and cut the pages of their books to read and digest them.)

Until Tuesday the 8th!

HB