The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [18]
Indeed, people have been subsequently seduced by bread, in all ways, shapes, and forms: flat or leavened; sweet or sourdough; sliced or crumbled into coarse crumbs; whole grain or refined; topped with sauce and mozzarella cheese or cradling a ground-beef patty and ketchup. The prominent American food critic Jeffrey Steingarten asserted that “bread is the only food that satisfies completely, by itself” in his book The Man Who Ate Everything. That’s a big compliment for plain old bread (though, in all fairness to supporters of the beer theory, this wasn’t coming from the man who drank everything).
Let alone its deliciousness, bread became so significant throughout the course of history that the word frequently stands in for food or basic needs: “breadwinner,” “dough,” and in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us today our daily bread,” to name a few examples.
Basic, primal sustenance—this is what bread means to us as a culture. But when you look at all the steps involved in making it, it seems anything but simple. I couldn’t fathom how someone had first come up with it. First, whole wheat needed to be dried, cracked, and milled to a fine dust. Then you had to mix it with some leavening agent, like yeast, or probably back in the old days, just rotting ale. Then you had to pump gluten into it by kneading—for at least eight minutes, until you had worked up a sweat, all the while remembering to flour each and every surface of your workstation unless you wanted bits and pieces of white goop all over your counter and your hands. Then you had to bake it. Then it was fresh and usable in its current state for only one day—maybe two. Afterward, you had to come up with innovative ways to sneak it into other foods, like grinding it up to thicken soups, or to stretch meatballs, or making French toast or stuffing when it was stale.
Whoever came up with this system anyway?
It was alive!
I stared down at the bowl of dry active yeast, which I’d just mixed with warm water and sugar. It was bubbling and fizzy, but not in a familiar, Alka-Seltzer kind of way. More like a murky-gray-and-smelling-more-than-slightly-fetid sort of way. Active, I surmised.
I followed the next two instructions in DJ’s e-mail, swapping out a large saucepan in lieu of a mixing bowl big enough to fit everything in. After stirring the thawed package of squash together with the flour, milk, and yeast, I had a big pile of what looked like bright orange Play-Doh.
Turn it onto a floured surface and knead the rest of the flour in.
I dusted a cutting board with some flour and scraped up the orange putty with my hands. I played with the dough for a few minutes, rolling it into a ball and smushing it back onto the cutting board with the flat of my palm. The dough was so sticky that it stuck to my palm and spurted through the slats of my fingers as I worked. Stubbornly, the bits and pieces that coated my hands would never quite integrate back with the rest of the ball.
Form into a ball and place inside a greased bowl. Cover with a towel and let rise until double, about 2 hours.
That should be easy enough. I slicked butter inside Erin’s mixing bowl and plopped the dough ball into it.
The lock of the apartment door clicked and Erin walked through. A shuffle of plastic immediately followed her steps as she plopped her groceries on the floor to coddle the cat that was waiting for her.
“Want to make dinner?” she said as she came through the hallway.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said. “I’ve got stuff on the way, but it might take a while.”
“Good. I picked up some snacks,” Erin said.
By then it was about eight o’clock, and I was famished. I considered cooking the rest of the ingredients I’d bought for dinner and leaving the rolls for later, as a dessert. That was what I would have to do.
Erin shoved a bag on the kitchen counter. She took out a couple of avocados, a bag of tortilla chips, and a six-pack of beer. We spent the next couple of hours talking, listening to music, talking about the music, talking about our latest projects