Fifteen years ago, on a winter afternoon, I suddenly longed for the aroma of fresh-baked bread. I grabbed an old cookbook and got to work.
A few hours later, the loaf turned out OK, sort of. Edible but not what I’d expected.
“That does it – I’m going to master the art of bread-baking if it’s the last thing I do!” I said in a burst of confidence.
That confidence has dwindled. Here I am, 15 years later, still trying to make a “perfect” French baguette or a round loaf of sourdough bread. Through the years, I’ve had successes (some of them happy accidents), but the more I bake a variety of breads, the more my dream of “mastery” recedes – that impossible dream.
To console myself, every week or so I make huge loaves of bread to feed birds and squirrels. They don’t seem to care it’s not perfect.
Like many people in the 1950s, our family grew up eating mainly “Wonder Bread,” an anemic, store-bought loaf that felt and looked like white foam padding.
Years later, I worked for a time at Lakeland Bakery in east St. Cloud, taking just-baked bread off the rotating shelves of a huge oven. I was transfixed by the aroma. It always reminded me of Grandma Saunders baking bread in her wood-fired farmhouse kitchen near Benson.
Years later, while on a month-long train tour of Europe in May 1981, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven the first time I bought a baguette in Paris. Baguettes are long, thin loaves of bread with a wonderful chewy texture and a delicate crispy-crackly crust. As I traveled throughout France, I’d often stock up on baguettes and fromage (cheese) and put them in my backpack to enjoy wherever I happened to go.
The Italian breads were also incredible.
In a small village in northern Greece, I popped into a small old bakery and bought a loaf of some kind of peasant bread still warm from an old wood-fired stone oven. Again, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The texture of that bread, its crunchy crust, its taste and aroma of herbal rosemary. Unforgettable!
My next happy obsession with bread happened back in America – at the summer-fall farmers’ markets in St. Joseph and Sartell. There, I would often buy locally made “artisan” breads and kept wondering how anyone could make bread that good. All of those bread-eating experiences planted the “seed” for my eventual determination to master the art.
One of my accomplices in bread-baking is Kim Steinle, a friend in Alexandria. She, too, is constantly tweaking recipes, trying to achieve “perfect” homemade bread. A flurry of emails goes back and forth between us as we struggle along: trying a new recipe, putzing and fussing with making a sourdough starter mix, constantly tinkering with the infinite variables of bread-making: temperature, yeast amounts, measurements, water-spritzing the inside of a hot oven to crisp up the crusts of baguettes, and the many ways to prep various doughs. It’s endless trial-and-error with (thankfully) some grand successes along the way.
In a recent email, I wrote Kim this: “I actually think a person could spend a lifetime learning about bread. That’s why I often laugh when I recall my vow to master bread-making. Ha! Ain’t gonna happen.”
Kim wrote back: “Yes, bread is mystifying. But even if it isn’t perfect, it’s always wonderful to have a freshly cut, warm piece of bread. That instant moment when you bite into it, there’s a feeling that it can’t get any better than this!”
If you want to learn how to make bread, I’d recommend a book entitled “The Wooden Spoon Bread Book” by Marilyn M. Moore, available online. It’s the first beginners’ cookbook I bought 15 years ago. I’ve had tasty successes with many of its recipes, including a savory herb loaf and a cinnamon-raisin bread.
Go for it. Bread-baking can be a big challenge – but a good one, a rewarding one. So who cares if you don’t manage to master it?
