Periodically I get into a bread-baking groove. It started when my oldest two kids were babies in the UK. I found an 8-pence packet of yeast easily converted into Mark Bittman’s simple No-Knead round. It also significantly enhanced the affordability, charm, and pace of our life in that damp climate.
When we were back stateside where processed bread is often unnaturally cheaper than yeast-and-flour, that once daily ritual sputtered along for about a decade. I took a class; I bought a kitchen scale and a banneton, but that’s about it. Then, when COVID sealed us all back into our kitchen caves, my dear friend Lia shared her Sourdough Workshop to stay connected with friends across the distance and (as it did for many others) the now-enhanced liturgy began again in earnest - for a little while at least!
These days I’m back to bread-making at a pace that hinges on the resurrectability of a half-dying starter tucked behind the sriracha in my fridge. But I’m not wholly out of practice. So it was yesterday’s batch that got me thinking about the relationship between bread and attention, or - to be more precise - my frequent lack of it.
A key part of bread making is… well, lots of things, honestly. But one of the basics is letting the shaped dough rise for one final 3-4 hour window before baking so it can properly “proof”. If you rush it the bread turns out small, puffy, dense, and tough. If it is “overproofed”, by sitting too long, the bread comes out flat and extra sour.
Overproofing is my specialty. I get called away to deliver a forgotten violin to school, or get sucked into a work saga, or leave to watch a lacrosse game and never recall that my ever-quiet bread baby needs tending. So yesterday, when yet again I discovered a slightly crusty, misshapen, bloated sphere under a kitchen towel 7ish hours after I left it to rest (oops) I became introspective on this point. What does this say about me?
I have some less-than-charitable (and in all likelihood, true) reflections on that point, yet as I’ve sat with that question my thinking has moved away from self-criticism and more in the direction of wonder. More precisely, the wonder that despite my frequent inattention and variable neglects of starter, leaven, dough, and countless other steps in the process, for the most part, if I don’t give up on my dough baby, it doesn’t seem to give up on me. Time and again, I’ve seen my overproofed, sad-looking lump transform into a deliciously warm and tasty (if not perfect) boule and my family is rarely wise to any deficit.
For me, in a week that has been punctuated by some especially painful disappointment and disorientation, these resilient qualities of my oft-mistreated dough have felt like a new kind of living parable. Of course, for church people, there’s nothing new about a bread metaphor. There are the familiar omni-metaphors of Christ as the bread of life (John 6:35), or the Kingdom of God being likened to yeast working in dough (Matthew 13:33), and each week at the communion table one of my Anglican priests will serve me bread and wine saying, “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith, with thanksgiving.” Which is to say, there’s nothing terribly original in the whole bread//life parallel. I know.
Yet, as I was once again coaxing my sorry dough-blob back to life, feeling its limp texture as a recrimination of my chronic distractibility, I came to realize that when I hear these familiar bread metaphors I’m inclined to draw meanings that highlight bread’s nourishing, sustaining, or strengthening capacities. In short, the “rah-rah” parts of bread as feast and provision. Which I recognize is probably a very American Protestant take!
But for me, re-kneading some near-dead dough that had suffered under my own hand, taking in its silent testimony that the relevant harm (albeit inconsequential in the scheme of things) was not inflicted as an act of commission but omission, a simple disregard, lack of attention, the failure to remember, to see, to tend, to check, I was reminded of other, larger griefs that shared some of those same contours of absence, or lack. Quick to the surface came countless nagging and largely unanswerable questions, regrets, uncertainties, and anxieties about that ever-daunting second part of our weekly confession that acknowledges, “We have sinned against you / in thought, word, and deed, / by what we have done / and by what we have left undone.”
In that small embodied moment of sadness, as I let the wave of things left undone, unsaid, unseen, unrecognized, untried, unknown wash over me, I felt the tug of choice: scrape this sorry lump into the bin (again) and start over another day, or add some flour, chill it overnight, and see if it might resurrect a bit by morning.
I chose the latter. I’m not really sure why. Some last ditch hope I guess. Or, more likely, a flare of dogged persistence that wants just to try. Still, this morning I turned the oven to 500 and brought the dough up to room temperature while the cast iron pot heated. I slipped the smaller-than-usual dome into the pot when it was ready, scored a few lines, popped the lid on and gave it a shot.
Thirty minutes later as I lifted the lid, a perfectly respectable golden boule appeared. While a touch sour, no amateur eater could complain.
So what is the point of this? Is there really some other, different metaphor I have to draw here? Some richer, deeper insight into what bread has to teach us? Not really. But there is a twinge of some dimension that felt honest and important about this half-assed effort of mine.
In the truest truth of things there is no avoiding that good bread - the best of bread - is always the product of close care and attention. A skilled baker is accounting for temperatures down to the degree and weights down to the gram. They know the exact type and ratio of flour will impact the final product. Altitude, humidity, the size of a salt granule, the PH balance in local tap water, all alter a loaf’s precision. In this regard, someone skilled at bread-making elevates it to an art. This is an image of bread as life that encompasses all that is good and right and intentional and worthy and beautiful in our experience. And it is a gift.
But I guess what I took away from this latest occurrence in my own kitchen is the lesser-lauded fact that bread is also weirdly and unexpectedly forgiving. It’s as though the yeasty, wild, regenerative nature of the thing - while delicate and precise in many respects - is also perfectly suited to cover a multitude of errors. In this, I found an image of bread as life that accounts for much of what feels botched, scrappy, unintentional, and mistaken about our experience. And that is the parable I especially needed this week. The cool, flesh-like, doughy reminder that yes, we are neglectful idiots all. Myself the queen of them, far beyond baking. But, my pretty boule testifies that despite all that, others may yet be nourished by my hand.
What a terrible, complicated truth that is to live. What an awful grace.
Brilliance. Brilliance.
These words are a balm. Thank you, Kate. Saving this for many a re-read.