Bread is not for busy people. It isn’t something that you rush, it isn’t something that you even control, but rather something that you wait for. It is not something to make if you have more important things to do, but nor is it something that is necessarily less important than whatever you planned to do today. Making bread is about patience, and it is about adaptation. It is about admitting to yourself that you are less powerful than a mere tablespoonful of tiny living organisms, and about humbling yourself enough to yield to their power. Yeast will own you, and that is what is supposed to happen. Making bread is about putting your mental and physical efforts into something consummately temporary, and it’s about putting your soul into something so mundane as a piece of morning toast. Slice, toast, butter, eat on the way out the door. That is what you become when you make bread.

      So why bake bread? I bake bread because it presents a kind of challenge rarely found in other aspects of my life. It requires you to stretch your abilities to the limit, but for what? For the fleeting satisfaction of peeking under the kitchen towel to find a risen mound of dough, or of inhaling the scent inside of a yeasty oven when the kitchen timer beeps. Bread is an all-day activity that requires the type of foresight that email, cell phones, and “just call me when you get there”s have made all but obsolete. It is so unnecessary these days to have a full-day plan; to know what exactly you will be doing in 2, or 4, or 6, or 8 hours. Baking bread forces that kind of planning, because once you’ve started, there is no going back. You can stick your risen dough in the refrigerator in the hopes of taming that wild yeast, that after a few hours has already developed a personality of its own, but this is indeed a great risk. There could be nothing so unsatisfying as sacrificing 15 minutes of rigorous kneading time for naught, and it’s almost always better to stick it out, wait for the rise, sit through the proof, slash dutifully, and sustain your doing-nothingness until the loaf emerges from the oven.

      I’ve always been a baker; since I can remember I’ve loved making treats and sweets; cookies and cakes and other caloric trifles that gratify instantly, after only a mere 20 or 40 minutes in the oven. I still bake these things at every opportunity, but now I’ve discovered bread, and there is something about bread that is wholly different from cakes and brownies and muffins and scones. My theory is that we love baking because of the element of surprise involved in its practice. Once a batter is in the oven, there is no going back; there is no readjustment. Cooking is a continually evolving practice, that necessitates constant tasting and adjusting. We cook in real time, watching steam evaporate, sugar dissolve, wine reduce. We bake, though, in expectation of what our labor will become, sometimes underestimating its potential, often overestimating it. Although we can peak in the oven and check the progress of our creations, there is a definite powerlessness embodied in the barrier of the oven door. Brownies are a quaint delight, soufflés are an extreme sport.

      Bread, then, is for the ultimate risk-takers, who are willing to dedicate a significant amount of their day to something that might fail to rise, that might taste off or not salty enough, that might indeed end up as breadcrumbs or trash. This possibility of failure, though, is also what makes successful bread-baking so worth the time and effort. In that single instant in which you open the oven door to see a beautifully browned and risen loaf, previous hours of labor become an amorphous memory of time well spent instead of a burden of things still left to do.

      I think bread has an historical importance to people paralleled in only a handful of labors. From a physiological-scientific standpoint, bread is the ultimate food of recent history, and has been a staple in many Western diets for years. From a more psychologically holistic standpoint, though, bread is one of the few things that invites the melding of true artisanship with an essential human process: nourishment. Cooking itself is generally considered to embody this characteristic, but there is something even more sacred about bread-making, probably owing to the intense slowness of the process of its production. Today we can buy yeast in any supermarket, but traditionally, bread required a starter, and this in turn required days and weeks of slow cultivation, all of which took place at a microscopic – magical – level. Today this magical slowness is reflected in the prestige of “old” bakeries; ones that use starters created centuries ago and that have seemingly supernatural abilities to “capture” and “grow” the wildest and most delectable of yeasts. We can speculate about the reasons for which bread from this or that source is the best; we can rationalize in a scientific way about the chemical composition of the air in a certain part of the world, about the mineral content in local water, or about the effects of temperature and humidity on the process of fermentation. Ultimately, though, we are missing the link between molecules in the air or water and the sensation of tasting a truly wonderful loaf of bread. Although we can approximate the magic of bread with snippets of chemistry and biology, it’s the magic that keeps us loyal to our sourdoughs.

      I’m still a novice bread-baker, never even having attempted to cultivate my own wild starter. That is where I’m headed, though, when I finally commit a week or two to the cause of morning toast. Buddhist monks are known for creating sand art, large mosaics of colored sand that require the utmost precision and many hours’ worth of artistic concentration. Upon completion of these ephemeral masterworks, the monks leave their art to the whim of the winds, and their labor is blown away in a matter of seconds. Similar, though less dramatic, is the art of bread, and similar, too, is the mentality of the modern bread-baker.

      In an age of food blogs and a burgeoning “food-porn” industry, where we can preserve our creations on the internet and maintain the sense of pride in our labors long after they been devoured, this notion of the transience of production loses some of its force, but it still exists. Whereas baking bread was once a matter of survival; a functional means of providing nutrition in package-able loaves, it has become, at least to people like me, an exercise in patience and personal fulfillment, with an emphasis on the practice as opposed to the product. As much as traditionalist bakers will try to convince you that baking your own bread is healthier, cheaper, and tastier than buying loaves in the store or at a local bakery, this is obviously untrue. Taking into account the opportunity cost of making bread, not to mention the ever-increasing quality of commercially-produced bread, it is clear that buying bread is as healthy, significantly cheaper, and, most likely, tastier than homemade bread. No, your kitchen will not smell wonderfully of freshly-baked loaves from tucking a boule into your canvas sack at Whole Foods, but all things considered, buying is the rational approach. Luckily, rationality is not a reason I cite for making my own bread.

         

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