Bread

I make bread.  I do it two or three times a week, enough bread for me and my family and enough bread to share with friends.  It’s a very simple bread, 50/50 whole wheat and white flour, a little water, salt, and yeast.  I add a little olive oil, dried mint and garlic for the flavors they give.    

My bread seems to be remarkable to other people and to me as well.  I’m not sure if it’s because people don’t expect to get bread from a retired Park Ranger or because in fact, it actually is that much better than what you get in the supermarket. 

When I was growing up we never ate plain bread from the supermarket, Langendorf or Wonderbread.  We had Roman Meal whole wheat and rye breads from Oroweat Bakery, then a local bread from North Hollywood.  At the supermarket, if I didn’t want to pay the premium price for artisan bread I usually bought  Oroweat’s heartier breads. 

And then I started making my own bread a couple of years ago.  I’m not big on machines, though I suspect they make pretty good bread.  I mix it, knead it and do all those things on my kitchen counter.  Learning to work with the dough takes practice.  In the beginning I baked a lot of bricks, now my bread stands up pretty good, practice.  And this week with a little more kneading it got even better.  My friends like it and my daughter will eat slice after slice, toasted or not. 

It is a hearty loaf of bread.  It has some air in it, it’s not thickly dense but there’s a heaviness to it, a real bread feel. It’s makes great toast.  Like most home bread bakers my eventual goal is to make a French baguette or a Grace Bakery like Pugliese, light and chewy and good to the taste with a light and crunchy crust.   

I’ve read about it.  I think the “Make Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day” articles and books are in the same class with “Learn Spanish in 10 minutes a day.  Speak like a native in a month.”  It took me about seven years of obsessive study and practice to speak adequate Spanish.  I’m still working on the ‘Artisan Bread.’

I think my bread is real bread, not industrial bread, not bread made with special chemicals, techniques and tools, but bread the way people have been making it for 4,000 years or more.  Flour, water, yeast and salt, knead it, let it rise, knock it down, let it rise again and bake it.  I’m not in contol of the bread.  I’m not the one who makes it so much as the person who puts it all together and watches it create itself.  And I get what I get.  It is a wonderful gift, real bread with a real bread taste. 

The bread I make is real food.  It really doesn’t require anything more to make a meal.  It doesn’t have to be loaded with meat and cheese, it’s not a holder of stuff.  It’s the meal in itself.  In the morning I toast it and butter it for flavor.  When I have it for lunch, I eat it plain with a hunk of cheese.  Eating my bread I understand how bread was the staple of the European diet for thousands of years, what they lived on, the staff of life, the body of the resurrected god. 

Basic Bread

2 cups of unbleached white bread flour
2 cups of whole wheat flour (I like Trader Joe’s over Gold Medal)
1 level teaspoon of active dry yeast
1 teaspoon of salt
2 cups of warm water   
2 heaping teaspoons of dried mint
2 cloves of garlic finely minced
¼ cup of olive oil

I make a poolish first, 1 cup warm water, 1 cup flour white or whole wheat, half teaspoon of yeast.  The yeast I put in the water so the coating can dissolve and then I mix it all in a 4 quart plastic storage bowl I use as my mixing bowl.  I let it sit for the better part of the day or overnight with the lid lightly on, gaps showing so it gets plenty of air. 

Then I mix in the remainder of the ingredients, squeezing it together with one hand making a sticky mess.  I mix the yeast in the warm water again.  I dump the sticky dough out on a well floured large plastic cutting board.  Then I I begin working it,  dusting flour on the dough until I can keep it together and get it all off my hands.  I use 10 minutes of working it as my guide.  I want a workable dough that still has a lot of moisture.  I tried kneading a little more and that seems to work well. 

I put the dough  back in the bowl and then either leave it out to rise or put it in the refrigerator. I don’t put the lid on tightly.   I don’t want to asphyxiate the yeast.  I can leave it in the refrigerator overnight and make bread the next day or let it rise right then.  It needs to rise to twice it’s original size, two to three hours in my Oakland apartment, but it varies with the environment.  On Angel Island I had to let it rise in a cooling oven sometimes. 

If I leave it in the fridge I may pull it out to let rise a little more or left long enough it will reach twice its size in the refrigerator. Once it’s reached it’s maximum rise, I form it right away.  Falling in on itself is not good for the dough.   I use either a cookie sheet or a bread pan.  The cookie sheet gets a light dusting of flour, the bread pan a thin coat of oil.  I pull the dough out of the bowl, put it on the cutting board, dust it lightly, flatten it once, and then form it into the shape I want.  I like a round loaf on a cookie sheet, but sometimes I do a long loaf and sometimes the bread pan. 

I cover it with a towel and let it sit.  I want the dough to rise as far as it will go, practice.  It’s better than twice, it gets a nice loft and lightness to it.  In my apartment it takes about two hours but depending on the weather it can take longer.  I preheat the oven to 450^°.  I put the bread in for 15 minutes.  Then turn the oven down to 400^° and leave it for 20 minutes more.  The times and the temperatures are what I’ve found works best for me.  Turning it down after 15 minutes was the instruction in a recipe I recently read.  It made a good loaf the first time and I’ve been doing it since.  I think it kicks the loaf in the beginning and then lets it bake more slowly to finish.  It just feels right.  Baking bread is like that.

I pull the bread out and put it on cooling racks until it’s cool to the touch.  Bread tastes great, sliced and buttered out of the oven, but it slices better and is less rustic if you give it a chance to cool.   Patience is important in making bread.  But if your first few attempts come out bricks, even bread that isn’t quite there still tastes good right out of the oven.