Saturday morning
I bake bread so that I can
make toast on Sunday
In his collection of letters and essays, We are still married: stories & letters, (G.K. Hall, Boston, 1990), Garrison Keillor relates how he once worked writing obituary’s for a local paper.
Mr. Keillor says that on one occasion, he had called a family member for the basic facts on someone, a member of This, That and the Other and survived by Her, Them, Them and Them, when the family member said, “I don’t know if you can get this in, but one thing Dad did was swim across White Bear Lake and back every summer until he was eighty-two,” one man told me. “It’s nothing important, but it’d be nice if you could get it in.”
Mr. Keillor writes, “I did get it in.”
It was when I first read that story that I decided that I would like my obituary to say simply, ‘He baked good bread.’
I also thought it would be really cool … if it were true.
I must have read that passage when I was in my 30’s.
I have been trying to bake good bread since I was 10.
I was a goofy kid and I read a lot and the wonderfulness of home baked bread crept into my subconscious through books like Little House in the Big Woods and the Happy Hollister’s.
What I did not understand at that early age was that the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ in fiction did not have to apply to bizarre murder mysteries or space aliens or time travel but could be applied to the simple act of getting a drink of cold, clear water.
Take for example Larry McMurtry’s Cowboy Epic, Lonesome Dove.
The character named Clara, who lives on a ranch in the middle of Nebraska, hated being dirty and dusty and it is remarked that she often changed her blouse as many as three times a day.
Sure, no problem, no big deal, right?
Anyone who has read Robert Caro’s book, “The Path to Power” on the life of LBJ, where Mr. Caro details what it took for the ranch wife to do the laundry in depression era Texas to show how much the life of ranch wife might be impacted by electric power will question ANY ranch wife changing blouses 3 times in one day, let alone one week.
If you have pumped, carried and heated the gallons and gallons of water, at 8 lbs per gallon, necessary for the washing, rinsing and bleaching of clothes, a little dirt isn’t going to bother you.
I thought baking bread would be fun.
I also thought it would be easy.
I thought it had to be and I wanted to try.
I suspended disbelief that it could be anything else.
The real goofy part of this story is my Mom, who was raising and providing food and laundry services for me and my 10 brothers and sisters, indulged me in my efforts to bake good bread.
I asked if I could try to bake bread and she suggested starting with the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook recipe.
I start ‘proofing’ the yeast, scalding and waiting for milk to cool, letting the dough rise twice, lots of kneading, and finding the ‘right’ pan.
From there, I did learn to produce ‘bread’ and ‘rolls’ (demanding access to the kitchen and oven for big family meals like Thanksgiving and Christmas – why I wasn’t told to go away until another day, I don’t know), they weren’t what you would call good and mostly, it wasn’t easy.
There was this voice in the back of my head that kept saying, if people did this every day, it could not have been this involved.
Also there was the question of ‘consistency’.
What I mean by that what is that every loaf of bread and every batch of rolls I made was different.
I never knew how they might turn out until I pulled the pan out of the oven.
There were some successes and lots of failures.
I remember very well a nicely brown honey whole wheat brick that defied slicing.
I kept at for years.
I tried all sorts of recipes.
I bought all sorts of baking pans.
I drew the line at buying a ‘bread proofing’ basket where the dough is tucked into layers of towels in a wicker basket that the makers said was ‘just like they use in bread bakeries in France.’
I remember once my Mom and I watched an episode of the ‘French Chef‘ where Julia Child went to Bread Bakery in France and there were no wicker baskets filled with dough.
There was the sweaty crew of guys, all smoking cigarettes, throwing dough around like footballs and slicing patterns in the crust with a bare razor blade they held with the teeth when they weren’t using it.
I tried to follow the sour dough road for awhile.
One of my sons got me a sour dough culture that claimed to have come from the oldest identified bakery in the world.
But sour dough bread baking is a lifestyle and after one or two really good loaves, I lost the thread.
I did get to the point that I could crank out bread, pizza crusts and cinnamon rolls on demand and some were good and some were not so good but they were what they were.
Always I kept thinking, it has to be easier than this and the result had to be consistent.
A couple years ago I came across recipe for bagels in an article titled, “Baking fantastic bagels is supremely simple.”
I looked at the recipe and I thought why not and bagels, pretty good bagels, resulted.
I got pretty good at them and achieved, for bagels, consistency.
Which got me looking at the recipe for the bagel dough.
It could not have been simpler, provided you had a Kitchen Aid Mixmaster and I did, a hand-me-sideways from a sister in law who has all the kitchen gadgets.
You take yeast, sugar, salt, flour and water and dump it all into the mixmaster and, using the dough hook, mix it all up for 10 minutes and then let raise for 1 hour.
I thought again, why not, and tried the recipe for bread.
Into a pan and bake at 425 for 35 minutes or longer for thicker crust and … BREAD.
On a consistent basis.
No suspension of disbelief needed.
It worked again and again.
Using this recipe, I can confidently look forward to turning out this loaf bread.
It only took me 60 years to get here.
My Saturday morning starts with making the dough and getting the bread in the oven so it is ready by lunch time.
The smell of baking bread fills the house and when lunch time shows up, my wife and I stand at the counter while I slice into the still hot loaf which we gobble up, GREEDILY, with liberal amounts of butter.
We can polish off half the loaf in minutes if we aren’t careful.
Then the bread cools and is wrapped up.
Sunday morning, I get up and slice myself two thick slices and drop them into the toaster.
I get my coffee cup ready.
The smell of the toasting freshly baked bread and the scent of the coffee provides an oasis of peacefulness.
Possibly it is the most civilized act of my entire week.
The bread, now toast, pops up and I get the too hot slices onto plate.
Spread with butter and cut in half, I take the toast and my mug of coffee and sit down with the papers, armed and protected against the news of the day.
I bake good bread.
Saturday morning
I bake bread so that I can
make toast on Sunday
PS: what is this recipe?
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 1/2 tablespoons of white sugar
3 teaspoons your favorite active dry yeast
3 1/2 cups bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
Mix it all up for 10 minutes and let rise for 1 hour.
Beat down, knead for a bit and shape into a load and into baking pan
Oven at 425 for 35 minutes – longer for thicker my crust – I love the crust but my wife does not so I try for a happy middle ground.
TWO TIPS – I use the yeast from the jar. Maybe it makes a difference, maybe it doesn’t but after 60 years, I do NOT trust those little foil packets of yeast. AND, I use a cast iron loaf pan that has never been washed. Not saying you have too, just saying.
No Haiku For You 