Homemade Bread
Passover is coming to a close which means soon I get to eat real bread again. I don’t care what you say, in my book, matzo does not count as bread. Calling matzo bread is like calling gravy a stew. Sure they are related, but anyone who ordered a stew and got a plate of gravy would be severely disappointed. Luckily I have some homemade bread waiting in the freezer and I’ve never been more excited. Let’s rewind a week to the day before Passover 2020...
April 7, everyone is in quarantine and everyone seems to be baking bread. I have a week of matzo eating looming ahead of me and a happy sourdough starter that’s raring to go. What a dilemma! I decided to try a bake. Best case scenario, I’d throw it in the freezer to enjoy after Passover, worst case scenario it would be a failure like my last attempt and I’d give up bread baking once and for all. It turned out better than I could have imagined. The bread I pulled from my oven had a dark thick crust and a beautiful moist crumb. It may not have risen as much as I would have liked, and yes, it had a bit of a burnt bottom, but it smelled fantastic. But, I’m not here to brag. In fact, I am not a talented baker. I’m not even a lucky one judging by the previous failed attempts I don’t even want to tell you about. What I am though, is in awe of bread and those who have mastered it.
As I was searching for words to talk about bread I turned to Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Cooked is divided into four sections (Fire, Water, Air, Earth) which each discuss the various methods of cooking transformation. In Air, Pollan writes, “Few things are as ordinary as a loaf of bread, yet the process by which it is made is extraordinary–and still something of a mystery even to those who study it or practice it every day.” Bread making is both science and magic. It represents an alchemy by which grass is converted into nourishment and as Pollan points out, it also represents civilization.
Bread is big and daunting and there are so many who have devoted their lives to studying it, mastering it, making it and teaching it. Given my relative lack of experience I’m not here with a recipe or any unique techniques. I’d also guess that bread is the most written about food of all time so it hardly needs me to sing its praises. I’m simply here to record my experience and share one humble opinion: everyone should fail at baking bread at least once in their life.
Baking challah on Christmas eve has been some of the only consistently successful baking I’ve experienced in my cooking career. “Holiday challah” as I’ve started to call it has become an annual tradition.
I’ve always wanted to be more of a baker but even when I’ve temporarily caught the baking bug my enthusiasm always eventually peters out. Is it because of the complexity, or the labor, or more likely the clean up required. It’s probably a combination of all the above. I find cooking so much more freeing (and forgiving) whereas baking often requires diligent recipe following and precise execution. My forays into baking have included the occasional banana bread loaf, a few yeasted breads over the years, including an annual challah around the holidays, and three different attempts at sourdough.
My first attempt came years ago after reading Cooked and becoming inspired by Pollan’s account of his bread making adventures. I caught a starter myself, fed it diligently like a pet, and then fumbled through the bread making procedure and ended up with lopsided yet edible loaves of bread.
Here are my first ever sourdough loaves from way back in 2016. They look pretty sloppy and although edible and flavorful I wouldn’t exactly call them a success.
My second attempt came during the first week of self-isolation, using a sourdough starter given to me by a friend at our neighborhood bakery, Cheeseboard. This starter was more vigorous but I was less diligent and without a kitchen scale I scrambled up the ratios and ended up with a wet mass of dough that couldn’t hold its shape. After a semi-successful attempt to repurpose the dough into focaccia, the whole lot ended up in the compost bin since it was dense and had soured after spending too long fermenting for my taste.
The focaccia looks okay and it even tasted good while still warm. Once it had cooled it became tough and chewy and headed straight for the compost bin.
Once I’d calmed down from several bouts of cursing and was angrily cleaning the messes I’d made during that second attempt, Alyssa decided to take matters into her own hands and order me a kitchen scale. She also ordered some quality whole wheat flour from Community Grains. Emboldened by my new tools and ingredients I decided to give sourdough one more crack before throwing in the towel.
Where my previous attempts had me following a modified Tartine technique, this time I used the NYT Cooking Guide to Sourdough by Claire Saffitz. This recipe, while similar to many other sourdough guides I’d read (including the aforementioned Tartine technique), allowed for one ten-minute kneading session to develop the dough's gluten structure. In my previous attempt I’d used the fold and turn technique and simply wasn’t getting the structure I needed for the loaf to retain its shape. This time around, the kneading and my asinine attempts to keep the house at 75 degrees during the resting stages seem to have done the trick. I even went so far as to copy down the recipe’s steps into a spreadsheet with times and a formula to calculate what time of day each step should be completed based on my start time. Whether it was the scale, the better ingredients, or a new procedure, my third attempt finally produced a loaf I was proud of.
As I mentioned before, it’s far from a perfect loaf. The loaf is a bit squatter than I would have hoped, the scoring looks amateurish and the bottom is undeniably burnt. But it’s my loaf. I toiled and struggled and made something worth eating and marveling over. Sure, I may have forever stained my orange dutch oven black in the process, and yes I made bread on the first day of passover so got to do all the cleanup without any of the eating, but it was all worth it. It was worth it for this loaf but also for every beautiful loaf of bread I eat in the future. I have a newfound appreciation for the art of bread making and am less likely to forget the mystery and magic behind an ordinary loaf. Now more than ever is a good time to remember the extraordinary in the ordinary. So go fail at bread-making. You’ll appreciate your next slice even more and if you’re lucky and patient and more diligent than I, you might not fail at all.
Who doesn’t love a cross-section, am I right?
Resources
Here are some of the resources I relied on while baking these loaves.
Follow @jenniferlatham on instagram. She is head of bread at Tartine and has been posting videos regularly.
The Perfect Loaf website, guides and recipes.
My nerdy sourdough timing spreadsheet
Friends who are better bakers than I. Go find some, they are out there and willing to help!
Here’s a bonus, mesmerizing video of Chad Roberston making three types of bread. I must have watched this video a dozen times and still find it fascinating.
Video: How to make 3 types of bread ft. Chad Robertson
What are you waiting for?
P.S. is it just me or have you also noticed that the Great British Baking Show contestants who end up doing well on the bread-making episode tend to go deep into the season or even make the finals?