The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [21]
Still, bread is much more than a groovy experience for the person making it. Breadmaking can provide a welcome island of calm in our hectic lives, but if there is no space in your schedule for that, you still need good bread. (Probably you need it even more.) We hope to persuade you that with a little skillful juggling, your bread dough—tolerant, patient stuff—will take what stolen moments you can offer it and give you splendid loaves on nearly any schedule at all.
Breadmaking has been so much a part of the rhythm of my own life for the last many years that it is hard to remember not doing it; but like almost everybody, I suspect, the very idea of baking one’s own bread was overwhelming and outlandish to me until one rainy day when my first loaf burst fragrant from the oven, and was sliced and eaten. I hadn’t read much Tolstoy and didn’t have any idea of the noble necessity of bread labor, but I did have the feeling that I was doing something dignified and real. Somehow I found time to bake again, and then another time, and before long, every week.
It was in the sixties, in Berkeley, when my life was most hectic, that the comfort of baking meant most of all. I was working full-time in the Cal Library and going to classes or meetings every night. The week seemed to hurtle by without a moment to slow down, and I couldn’t wait for Saturday and the quiet of my kitchen, and the giant mustard-colored pottery bowl. It was the still point in a whirlpool, and probably saved my life. I made enormous batches of bread, more than a dozen loaves—the apartment was tiny, but it had a big oven—and gave them to nonbaking friends, some of whom needed the nourishment. I admit that I enjoyed eating the bread myself, heavy and sweet as it was in those days, but sharing its goodness was an essential part of the satisfaction.
If you bake regularly, you will gradually work out a comfortable schedule that is all your own. Breadmaking is in this aspect personal: you learn how to give it your best attention, how to work in friendly harmony with the yeast. When you can give it scope to perform its miracle, the yeast will amaze you with its flexibility in adapting itself to your requirements.
Yeasted dough requires attention only at intervals, as every baker knows. It does most of the work itself while you tend to other things, and can fit itself into the nooks and crannies of a truly jam-packed schedule. One busy lawyer friend who manages this feat is Katie. She likes to make bread with an “overnight sponge” recipe, but she sets it up in the early morning, instead of in the evening. The kneading is done before dinner, and the bread bakes later while dishes are washed, stories told, or writs written.
John and Bethann have improvised another variation of the overnight method. They are neighbors who share baking for their two families. He mixes and kneads the dough in the evening, leaving it on his cool back porch until morning, when Bethann takes over. Their cooperative venture bags them four or six loaves per baking; he is strong enough to knead that much dough and she easily manages the rest, using their households’ two ovens.
Probably among my friends, the bakers with the biggest challenges are the ones with small children about. For them, life is full of unpredictable adventures, and so the best bread recipes are those that give most leeway in timing. But it isn’t only that; when you bake for school-age brownbaggers, so sensitive to critical eyes in the lunchroom, you can make life a lot easier if your good homemade bread looks as though it came straight off the supermarket shelf—even when it is packed with nutrition. Busy People’s Bread is our nominee for best supporting loaf in cases like this. With it, you can set up your ingredients the night before and mix the sponge in a few stolen moments before breakfast. Later—even if it turns out to be several hours later—when the dust settles, you can make