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Walter’s class met in the Reynolds kitchen on Wednesday evenings. He would prepare for it by stirring up a vast batch of dough when he got home from work. When his students arrived a couple of hours later, the dough would be rising in a big plastic garbage can. As soon as people walked in they would roll up their sleeves and start to shape Walter’s dough. Those first loaves would come out of the oven about the time the students’ own dough was kneaded and ready to rise. Everyone went home with a hot loaf of bread and a very good idea of what breadmaking was all about.

Walter originated a no-equipment method of baking: measure with a coffee can, mix, then turn the dough out on floury newspaper. Knead it well, let the dough rise in any convenient container, grease the coffee can, put in the dough, and let it rise again. Bake, of course, in the can.

Coffee-can bread had become famous two summers before, when Walter and others turned out hundreds of loaves a week from the basement of a church in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, using donated flour to provide what was sometimes the only sustenance for many of the ‘flower children’ that received it. A few years later, during the Poor People’s March on Washington, the coffee cans reappeared in Resurrection City, where the bread came off the back of Walter’s pickup truck, hot from a gas oven converted to propane. The country was just catching on to the idea that whiteness and goodness are not necessarily the same, and Walter and Ruth Reynolds believed good brown bread had a part to play in the drama.

We don’t bake in cans anymore, but we still carry with us what Walter taught: a lesson deeper than words about recognizing hunger and doing something pretty daring and friendly to address it. To make nourishing bread, and to reach out with it, continues that loving gesture in some small way.

First Aid What to do if something goes awry

Sometimes partway along in a baking you find that something is wrong. Possible setbacks are listed here, along with suggestions for snatching victory from the jaws of disaster.

The yeast does not bubble up

see this page You forgot to take the flour out of the refrigerator

Flour cold from the refrigerator will make cold, slow-rising dough unless you compensate by using warmer water. To calculate precisely how warm the water needs to be, plug into the formula—or, roughly:

for a 7 hour dough:

100°F water

for a 4 hour dough:

120°F water

for a fast dough:

140°F water

Mix the really warm water with the cold flour before you add the yeast, of course. If the yeast comes in contact with 140°F water, it won’t survive.

This method should really be considered an emergency measure, not standard procedure. The flour will perform better for you when it has a chance to warm slowly to room temperature overnight. The dough won’t knead up

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If you have to give up on it, here are some possibilities: roll the dough thin and make flat bread or crackers instead (millions of them). You can make Chapathis—Indian flat breads see this page; they’ll be good (if unauthentic) so long as the dough doesn’t have too much sweetener in it. Or, make piroshki. (The Laurel’s Kitchen kind, for example.)

As for the flour, if you bought it with the understanding that it was bread flour, return the rest to the store; they may not know that they are selling low-gluten flour as bread flour. Otherwise, keep it to use for muffins and quick breads, and as dusting flour.

You overkneaded the dough:

Make English Muffins.

First Aid

The kneaded dough does not rise in the bowl You are unexpectedly called away

Somehow, the yeast is not on the job. Dissolve another measure of yeast in ½ cup of properly warm water, with ¼ teaspoon of sweetener stirred in. If the new yeast bubbles to the top in a few minutes looking vigorous and enthusiastic, take your dough and press it out on the kneading board. Drizzle the newly activated yeast and water on the dough, and work them together well.

When the now very wet dough has incorporated the yeast and is smooth,