The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [5]
Right now, your week almost certainly does not include great chunks of hanging-around-the-house time. This doesn’t have to stop you. Look long and hard at Laurel’s suggestions for fitting bread into your life, and you may find that your current schedule need not be disrupted as much as you imagine.
It might possibly be, too, that someone else in your household would like to help. Many hands don’t just make light work, they can also make high-quality work. Today, when there are so many more pressures on all of us to be out and away from home, the “divide and conquer” principle has become standard kitchen practice. Just because no one’s home to cook all afternoon doesn’t mean nobody’s interested in good meals anymore. It may mean more innovative solutions are required to produce them: At one end of the spectrum, Friday night potluck with friends, at the other, communal householding.
One of my favorite cases in point is the annual Christmas-Hanukkah supper a friend stages each year, towards which everyone involved contributes one absolutely spectacular item. It’s understood that Jeff will bring the pies, because he always does, and that they will be exquisite, because they always are, and that they will be described in lingering detail on the also exquisite hand-lettered menus that are Rhoda’s gift to the evening.
The principle is infinitely variable—do you have a friend who’d love to trade homebaked bread for a panful of chili rellenos? A clipped hedge, maybe?
But let’s suppose the worst. Suppose none of Laurel’s optional timing schemes will work for you, and suppose that in response to all your gambits (“Wanna help? Wanna trade?”) no one has flickered an eyelid. Still, you really yearn to see that bread coming out of the oven twice weekly.
For a long time, you may just be It, and being It may well mean giving up some activity you’re not at all happy to part with.
If so, let me try to sweeten the cup. For there are compensations, not immediately apparent. Bring together four or five committed bread bakers, loosen them up with a strong pot of tea, and listen closely as they talk about the subtle, far-reaching, and distinctly positive changes that can take place when you begin to bake regularly…
First, on the personal level, there’s the purely therapeutic effect. Watch a four-year-old burst in the door after a long morning with his buddies, still exultant, talking nonstop, but exhausted, too, from the sustained stress of it all. Watch him fall with instinctive good sense on a pile of play-dough, and pull, push, pummel and squeeze until finally all the tension has flowed out through his fingertips and he is at peace. Watch him, and wonder why on earth grownups shouldn’t have access to the same very healing, very basic kind of activity. And in fact, they can. For kneading bread dough, forming it into coffee-cake wreaths or cottage loaves or long baguettes affords exactly this kind of satisfaction.
Good breadbaking is much more, though, than just a good outlet. At certain critical junctures, you really have got to block out extraneous goings-on and attend meticulously to small details. Far from being onerous, these more exacting phases of the baking process can also be the most calming—precisely because they do require such powerful concentration. And the very fact that so much of oneself is called upon, in the way of artistry and resourcefulness, makes the whole business that much more gratifying—enhances the quality of life overall.
That breadbaking—as well as gardening, spinning, beekeeping, and animal husbandry—is in fact creative and exacting is often overlooked. Instead, they are regarded as “subsistence skills”—what you have to deal with to scratch out a bare living, reeling, as you do, from the endless labor entailed. You can hardly blame our parents and grandparents for having set firmly behind them