This is another of the short essays I wrote for this year's homeschool writing group with Malachi and Daisy. I always feel like I could make a sacrament meeting talk out of this story…😄
I received the book “Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast” as a gift. It was an impressive tome; a Bible of sourdough baking, written by the owner of a famous San Francisco bakery. I tried to like it. I loved baking bread, after all, and had been doing so since I was a wee tot making tiny loaves in the tiny loaf pans my mother bought to encourage my homemaking skills. And the pictures were beautiful. But the author, the improbably named Ken Forkish, described the most banal of bread tasks with breathless exactness, and it seemed a little much. Did one really need a “technique” for mixing the dough? I wondered. (“The only truly reliable method is with the bare hands, using the non-dominant hand as a spatula to clean the other after each fold,” said Ken Forkish.) After the fourth time the book mentioned testing the pH of your water for optimum acidity, I tossed it aside in disgust.
“He makes bread baking sound like rocket science,” I complained to my husband. “He’s going to scare two-thirds of his audience away and make the other third incurably smug.” It seemed ridiculous to treat the process with such awe and sacredness, especially for a book whose whole premise had been the simplicity of bread made from only “flour, water, salt, yeast.”
I continued to make bread, and experimenting with the mix and method for my sourdough, but now I did it with a constant awareness of all the things I’d been ignoring my whole life: precise water temperature, folding technique, proofing baskets, bench resting time, oven spring. “Hah!” I’d think from time to time. “No wonder so many people get scared off from the perfectly simple process of making bread!”
It was about two years later that I ran into a breach in my routine; a scheduling conflict that left me with bread ready to bake but no time to bake it. I found a blog post that described a slightly different method of proofing—what I’d usually called the “second rise,” though with this bread it didn’t involve much actual rising—which gave the shaped loaves 24-48 hours in the refrigerator before baking. It solved my problem, so I tried it, and was pleased to find that the resulting bread was improved as well. It had a more open crumb and seemed to lift better in the oven (that “oven spring” I’d heard of). I changed my process, and now that I was doing this long refrigerator proof, I realized that proofing baskets would simplify the process considerably. I bought some a little sheepishly.
With the cold dough, scoring the bread suddenly became easier, and I felt a need to upgrade my scoring technique a little. Rather than one long slash, three sideways slashes seemed to give the bread a better shape, and I could even add decorative slashes between the lines.
Now that the long rise was happening in the fridge, I needed a bigger dough bucket to contain the first rise on the counter. I bought a big square industrial container with volume markings on the side, and quickly discovered how useful those markings were in estimating at a glance how much the dough had risen, or how long it had left to rise. I remembered, with a little stab of discomfort, how Ken Forkish had sung the praises of containers with volume markings, but I pushed the feeling aside.
I had been noticing every now and then that there would be a little pocket of unmixed flour in one of my loaves. It was annoying to bite into one of these pockets, especially when the rest of the bread-eating experience was going so well, and I tried to start being extra vigilant about getting my spoon all the way in and through the dough as I was mixing. It was hard, though, because the flour clumps would hide beneath the bowl of the spoon or in the corners of the container. Sometimes I’d be completely positive I’d mixed everything well, but when I went to shape the bread I’d be horrified to find an an entire section of the dough still stiff and crumbly with unmixed flour. I started reaching into the dough bucket to seek out these stiff spots and eliminate them. If I rubbed them between my fingers, the flour would soften and incorporate into the wetter dough around it. Pretty soon I found that it saved effort to just start with this method—my hand could find dry spots much more easily than the spoon, and then it could immediately rub and fold the dough much more efficiently than could a spoon. The dough was always quite shaggy and clumpy at first, so it stuck to my hand, but even with that inconvenience it worked better than a spoon.
It wasn’t until I was describing the process to a friend that I heard myself. “Go into each corner of the bucket with a bare hand,” I said. “It’s the only way to really feel that the dough is right. You can use your other hand as a sort of spatula,” I said, and the words echoed strangely in my ears, as if someone else were saying them. As if Ken Forkish were saying them.
