The Essence of Bread
Sorry, y’all. I’ve been the one baking lately and I haven’t taken many pictures. Nancy Hann/Getty
Ross reminded me, quite by mistake, that this post needed to be made. When we first got together, he had never (other than rolls for holidays, I believe, though anyone who knows about this should feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken) had home-made bread. Or maybe he'd tasted it but not so routinely that he remembered home-made bread as a thing separate from grocery store bread. Although covid has caused me to buy more bread (less time when facilitating remote schooling!), generally if we need bread we make it. When he wanted bread, I would make a loaf, since to me that was “just what you do.” This started turning into a loaf a day, which is kind of a lot (in a good way!), and it occurred to me that if I taught him how to make bread, I wouldn't have to make it as often anymore.
Now, that sounds a little bit like I don't like making bread, which is absolutely not the case. I love making bread. I just don't always have time to make a loaf every day. So, I decided to teach him how to make bread. He wasn’t the first person I've taught how to make bread, but he was the first person I taught bread to without recipes. Mainly because my relationship with bread, after around thirty years of baking, had changed by the time I got him.
In my home growing up, freshly made bread was a thing that was part of daily life. My mother didn't make a loaf every day, but like most moms in the 80s, she was a stay-at-home-mother and that afforded her the opportunity to do things routinely that so few of us do now. Because she stayed home, very little of our food was processed, and we kids grew up seeing food being made and participating in that making. It's a thing I'm still thankful for, since my entrance to the kitchen started before I could even write in cursive (which I could do when I was 5).
My mother was, hands down, an incredibly talented baker. She did pastry like nobody’s business, and often would make up random new pastries we got to nom out on. I remember clearly the smell of her starter in the house, treasured and kept in the fridge in a tall fermenting jars. You know, the kind with pre-printed 1960s or ‘70s decoration.
Like this one, but ours had a different design.
I remember watching her bake breads, cakes, pies, elaborate tortes, cookies and donuts. I assume she learned from her mother, since I have some of my grandmother's recipes too. I remember my joy in helping her make these things that we’d gobble down so quickly. I often wondered (although I no longer do) if it was even worth it to spend so much time making these things when they were gone so fast. We usually had some kind of store-bought thing around in case we wanted treats when she wasn’t baking, but those never had the traffic the homemade items did.
I remember when she went back to work, too. Suddenly, a pretty large percentage of the bread on our table came from the store, rather than from her hands. And you know what? It wasn't very good. We got used to it, or we baked instead of her baking, but it just wasn’t very good. I remember when I moved out and got my first place, I needed bread. Because I like to eat bread. So I bought bread. My mother observed this happening and gave me some cookbooks that focused on bread baking. And so then I baked bread and I bought bread. I baked bread mostly when I had one job, and when I was in school. I bought bread when I had three jobs. I didn't know about cold fermentation then, so it's no real surprise that life got in the way of my bread.
Bread baking was, for me, despite this incredible legacy, about recipes. I did not bake bread without a recipe, ever. It never even occurred to me that one might do so. Oh, sure. I would take existing recipes and rework them into entirely new things. But mostly I was sticking with an established base and turning it into something new-to-me. There was creation, but not creating. Nonetheless, I was a competent baker. I moved away from breads and into pastry, and became quite good at pastry. But still, regarding bread I was merely competent. I could get (good) bread on the table. My mouth understood bread, and so did my belly. But my brain and my hands did not yet know the essence of bread. When I taught people how to make bread, it was with recipes. I never taught them what bread was, because I didn't really know.
And then one day, I saw that my favorite baker, who had already started the process for me through which I learned about the essence of bread, Peter Reinhart, was opening up slots to be a recipe tester for an upcoming book. This was pretty exciting to me. I have several of his books, and I was interested to be on the team of testers as an opportunity not only to further my knowledge, but to see how his bread brain works, in progress. A chance to learn from the man who most accurately may be called the best. So I signed up. While testing recipes (and I did not test nearly so many as other testers did), I started realising the patterns. I also realised that because these recipes were works in progress, there was a lot of instructional information given in relation to the appearance, feel, etc. of the breads. And after decades of baking bread, something in my brain clicked. I could see the bread for what it really was. Finally.
After the completion of the testing, there was still a small span of time in which I baked bread with recipes. Mostly because I lacked the confidence to put them off to the side and just play with my flour. It's weird that as a person who so strongly advocates playing with food to learn about it, I was fully inculcated in a school of thought that was keeping me from knowing my bread. And then one day, my confidence was just high enough, and I decided, "screw it. I'm not using a recipe. Let's see what happens." I had a lot of the anxiety I see in emails I get from y’all, because I really didn’t believe I could do it without a recipe. I believed that this loaf was going to suck, because if you’re not a Baker, and if you aren’t trained to make up your own methods, surely what you come up with toward that end will never be good enough. I didn’t even know this was a belief and not a fact, because recipes had handicapped my baking for my entire life.
I tossed together some flour, salt and yeast. And then I added water until it "looked right." And then I kneaded it a bit and set it off to the side to be shaped, re-risen and baked later. My bread came out well. Really well. And when I tasted it, I knew that I finally "got" bread and that I'd not be using recipes for it again unless there was a specific bread I wanted that I didn't understand in my heart.
I do still occasionally use recipes for bread, but more as a guideline for a particular hydration I'm not familiar with the feel, look and smell of. As y’all know, now I have to remind myself to at least weigh what I’m doing in order to make new recipes for y’all! I'm thankful for this, mainly because sometimes I'd be in someone's house and there was a need for bread. And I could just toss it together without worrying about recipes. This, btw, is a double-edged sword: you really impress whomever you just baked for, but you rarely go to their homes again without making bread. Also thankful for this journey (still on the journey!) because I can make new ideas and flavors for y’all, and because if I can get myself to sit down and actually make bread, it’s never any trouble to have bread.
Ross came to me after I had this bread epiphany, and as such, when it was time to teach him how to make bread, I refused to teach him with recipes. He knows where the recipes are, and he's welcome to use them. He also knows how to use the internet, of course, and thusly he may look up any specific recipes he might need that aren't already in the house. But I figured I'd be damned if I was going to inflict on him the kind of restriction that recipes can sometimes cause in one's thinking. I didn’t know it was a punishment to be beholden to recipes, but once I found out, it’s become a bit of a mission for me to end people’s reliance on them. I like seeing people use recipes because they want to, not because they have to. It’s also cheaper to make your own bread, and if you are willing to experiment then it also doesn’t matter if you’re missing an ingredient you normally bake with.
Ross started with pita, since that is the bread we eat/make the most of. I explained about ratios of bread to water and we talked about the salt content, and how much yeast to use. My opinion on how much yeast to use is "however much you want." If you want it to rise a little more quickly, use a little more yeast, etc. We poked and touched and prodded and smelled the dough at every step of the way. We only kneaded for a few minutes here or there, and not even always. And then he was off. Now Ross makes a lot more of the bread in the house than you might imagine, because to him being able to do so is no big deal. He didn’t learn the way most of us do, so he doesn’t need to think about it to make bread. He just makes bread if he wants it.
I see him sometimes throwing together some ingredients and kneading them for what seems like an eternity to me. I see him other times throwing together some stuff and barely kneading them at all. Sometimes he tosses in some rye or whole wheat flour. Sometimes he doesn't. Bread, for him, is an organic, flowing process through which what you want to do is exactly what you do. The bread turns out as it turns out, and if something you didn't expect happened, you just think about what you did differently, and then come up with hypotheses (and test them) to decide how to create different effects.
Because it's so beautiful, that intuitive process through which he bakes, I sometimes sit in the kitchen and just watch him make the bread. Occasionally he asks me technical questions, but not usually anymore. And there's generally bread in the house. Lovely breads, rich in character and deep in flavour. Different breads. Sometimes sourdough, sometimes not. Sometimes quick breads, sometimes not. But always, always bread.
What I have learned from this is that there should be no other way of teaching the making of bread. I hate that I can’t teach bread to y’all the way I did to him, because internet v. real life, though occasionally I try to include some of that process in the posts. After a few short months of baking, Ross was a more talented bread baker than I have ever been and than I will likely ever be. I'm rich on technical knowledge, but still pretty new (12-13 years) on essence. He is all essence, which gives him the technical knowledge he needs, coupled with a flexibility I am still always teaching myself to remember to enjoy in my own baking. It's really a wonderful thing to behold, seeing him not need to think about the details.
His journey, interestingly, evolved, when he donated some of a starter to his best friend and taught her how to care for the starter and how to bake. And then she baked. Not only did she bake, but she gave away some of her starter and taught that person to bake, too. It was incredible to watch bread essence spread around like that. There’s a… bigness to process I watched unfolding in people's minds, hearts and mouths.
The reason I'm telling you all this story is because Wednesday, I'm planning to post Ross' recipe for pita. He came up with a non-traditional system for making pita that he showed me, and I figured we should try to preserve it. Because at the end of the day, when a person cooks by instinct alone, sometimes someone with technical knowledge needs to sit down and watch them and write it down so the method doesn't get lost when they die (me!). I faithfully wrote it all down so y'all can make it whenever you’d like to. It's not traditional pita, but it's phenomenal bread, and I think y'all should be able to have Ross' bread even if you don't have Ross. I'll never actually bake that recipe, because the recipe to me is Ross. It's for him to bake, and for me to eat.
