The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [9]
What Gandhi was insisting upon with that spinning wheel—he never quit talking about it, and carted it all over Europe as well as India—was the absolutely vital importance of how we accomplish the most mundane things in life: the putting of clothes on our backs and food on our tables. There is always a simpler way to meet these needs, he taught, and a more self-reliant one—always an adjustment to make that will foster better health and draw you into more richly interdependent relationships with others. There is always a choice.
Are Gandhi’s ideas applicable in this country today, so vastly different from British-ruled India? A great many people would appear to think so, for they are at work in every area of life, introducing reforms of enormous diversity that would have won Gandhi’s wholehearted approval: agricultural marketing projects; research into low-cost solar-heated housing; instructional programs in natural childbirth and breastfeeding; worker ownership of factories and co-operative food-buying clubs; urban gardening schemes and a growing number of home-based businesses.
Whole-grain bread baking has a very special place along this spectrum—particularly because it’s so immediate and personal, and so well within nearly everyone’s reach. It’s an ideal first step towards a way of life that is more self-reliant, and at the same time more consciously interdependent. We’re tempted to see it, in fact, as the khadi of our own day.
We’re tempted to think, too—taking our cue from Gandhi and judging from our own experience—that when you begin to adopt the kind of changes in life style outlined above, you aren’t only making choices more consistent with the world you’re trying to bring about. Rather, you actually are bringing it about. The compass of that new world might at first seem no longer than the distance from your kitchen stove to the front door—but don’t be deceived. The fact of what you are doing will most certainly make itself felt by everyone who comes in contact with you (by people, in fact, who happen only to walk past your house on baking day). Your personal example assures them that indeed life can be both simpler and more challenging, but much more satisfying in the bargain. It encourages them in the most irresistible way possible to take that first step themselves.
In short, the idea that life’s really important and far-reaching changes come “from the bottom upwards” no longer seems to us romantic or overly optimistic at all. Let’s begin, then, at the beginning …
A Loaf for Learning
A Loaf for Learning
The very best way to learn to make bread is to bake often, alongside someone who is really good at it, with lots of leisure for questions. This section is meant to be as much like that as we can get without being in your kitchen with you. You could say the Loaf for Learning is a short course on breadmaking; repeat for credit any number of times.
It isn’t that you can’t learn to make bread by yourself, by trial and error (or error and trial, as it usually turns out!), but breadmaking has so many variables that it is tricky to pin down what makes the same recipe turn out light one time and heavy the next, or why it tastes funny this week when it was fine last week. When you have an idea of what is actually going on in the dough during mixing, kneading, rising, and baking, your skill will increase and you will be much more in control.
We have been baking for (good grief) more than fifteen years, but really until we worked on this book, we never approached mastery, the kind that lets you observe wisely, learn from what you see, and convey what you learn clearly. (Some of us thought we had, but it was actually not mastery but an affectionate mixture of unchecked