The Romance of a Loaf of Bread
By Robert Capon, published in the NY Times on 10/9/88
Larry’s Home Baked Sour Dough Loaves - 6/22/23
EVEN THE SOUND OF IT ASTONISHES. A loaf of bread straight from the oven, when it is turned out of the pan and tapped on the bottom with a knuckle, has the ring of life to it. Beneath the hardness of the crust lies the hollowness of a million cells. The ear judges and strains to name what it hears. A click? Too inanimate. A tunk? Too dull. A tock? Not resonant enough. The mind intervenes: the sound is the culinary equivalent of a rap on the back of a violin.
And hearing is the least of the senses addressed. The nose has been engaged all through the process of bread making. It has smelled the fragrance of yeast being proofed, the odor of flour as it opens in the presence of water, the graceful scent of caramelization as the loaf browns in the oven and the quintessential aroma of hot bread as the baker cuts off the heel for a personal reward.
Oh, of course. Hot bread with pats of cold butter melting into it is bad for you. So is cookie dough, raw pastry and cake batter licked off the spatula. Tell it to the marines - or, more properly, tell it to the centuries of children and the armies of grandmothers and great-aunts who, thank you very much, will doubt not their safety but your sanity.
Back to the senses. Touch has had a field day. A ball of dough on the kneading board is not an object; it is a partner in a rough amour. But gentleness triumphs: the risen loaf before baking is just yielding enough to hold the gentle depression made by two fingers. Sight has been delighted all along: by the heen the lump takes on when kneaded to perfection, by the shape of the loaf as it goes into the pan, by the arching of the top as it rises in baking, by the color as the bread is turned out onto the rack, by the visible, sometimes even audible, cracks in the crust that appear as it cools. And taste? Ah! With taste, the common sense, the synthesizing faculty of the mind, intervenes for good. This is what it was all about. This is bread.
We have arrived at one of the oldest, best, commonest, simplest, most complicated, most uniquely human things in the world. True enough, it is in one way just a creature of the earth - of grain from the fields, water from the ground, sugar from the cane, salt from the mine yeast from the surfaces of living things, even from the air, if we include sourdough breads. But in another way it is we alone who are the authors of bread. And not by research and hard work. Most of the great achievements of the human race have come out of the leisure of minds impatient with the drudgery of meeting obvious needs. How many Saturday afternoons of fooling around went by before it occurred to somebody that the inside of the spruce and the maple, the gut of the sheep, the tail of the horse and the sap of the pine could be combined into violin and bow? Why did we ever think of grinding wheat into flour, of taming yeast, of milling sugar, unless it was that we are committed, at the depths of being, to moonshine and soap bubbles? Our best has always come when we had nothing better to do.
Bread is the improbable triumph of play. We did not reason our way to the discovery that the kneading of flour-and-water paste would develop the gluten in wheat into an elastic network. No series of prior propositions led us to the conclusion that yeast, feeding on carbohydrates, would produce carbon dioxide, which would then be trapped in the network to create cellularity, or that heat would cause the cells to expand. It was all done as solemn high fun, as a sacrament of the Grand Lark that is our ultimate raison d'etre.
Bread is old. God gave plants for cultivation that we might bring forth wine to make us glad and bread to strengthen the heart. Melchizedek the king offered bread and wine to Abraham. The Jews baked unleavened bread at the exodus from Egypt. Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves, called himself the Bread of Life and, in one of his choicest, tersest parables, likened God to a woman baker who puts the yeast of her kingdom into the dough of creation and leavens the whole world.
Bread is ubiquitous. We sing of America's ''amber waves of grain,'' but the great grasslands of the Middle West are more moving than any hymnody. Confronted by their boundlessness - they are their own horizon - the mind weighs the word ''farm'' in the balance and finds it wanting. These are not plots of land put to incidental uses; they are worlds of cultivation, triumphs of the human race's civilizing touch.
Wheat may well have been the determining factor in our transformation from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers. There should be a monument to the first family or tribe that, instead of eating up the wild grains it found and moving on, saved some seed, planted it and settled down long enough to see it grow.
But bread is more than historic; bread is nourishing. Yet it preceded the notion of nutrition by millenniums. And bread continues to precede nutrition in every generation. Grains and legumes, nutritionists tell us, are a rich source of protein - in fact, when they are eaten in combination they provide a perfect balance of amino acids. But all children discover this with no scientific training at all. The peanut butter sandwich reigns supreme in the juvenile diet; the baked bean sandwich is continually reinvented. And even though the lamentable fad of light eating has banished bread from our dinner tables, all of us still know better: when a restaurant serves good bread, we eat ourselves silly on it even though it is free and the cassoulet we are too full to finish costs $20.
On balance - actually, on imbalance - we eat too little bread and too few complex carbohydrates. Since the beginning of this century our consumption of such carbohydrates has been declining, while our intake of fat has been increasing. It has only been fairly recently that the nutritionists have been able to get out the truth that complex carbohydrates are essential to a sound diet.
But not all bread is equally nourishing. A kernel of wheat consists of three parts: the six outer layers of indigestible coating called bran; the germ, or sprouting section, and the inner bulk of the kernel, the endosperm. All three are nutritionally important. In addition to vitamin B6, riboflavin, thiamine and protein, the bran provides fiber for the proper working of the intestinal tract. The germ contains the same B vitamins as well as vegetable oil and vitamin E. The endosperm consists primarily of complex carbohydrates (which the body converts into blood sugar, its principal fuel); it also contains protein, riboflavin and more B vitamins.
Different methods of milling wheat deal differently with these nutritional treasures. Stone-grinding preserves them best, exposing the grain only briefly to friction-induced heat. Whole-wheat flours milled by high-speed machines may lose somewhat more in the process, but still make nourishing bread. White flour is another matter.
Our preference for white bread (developed, presumably, for reasons of esthetics and cachet) is not all bad: a crusty loaf of it, fresh from the hands of a good baker, is one of the joys of gastronomy. The white flour used to make it, though, has given up a great deal. The fiber of the bran has been sacrificed; the oil and vitamin E of the germ have been removed in the interest of longer shelf life, and up to 80 percent of the essential nutrients are missing. Hence the ''enriching'' - restoring some of what was lost.
Breads made with whole grains - whole wheat, whole rye, barley, rolled oats - are the best source of balanced nourishment. But no simple reliance on the brownness of a given loaf is enough. Breads can be made brown by the addition of molasses or other coloring. Rye bread is always a mixture of rye and white flours. You could make black bread with white flour if you added enough caramelized sugar; conversely, whole-grain rye, once the necessary white flour has been added, will make only a light grayish-brown loaf unless it is colored aggressively.
All in all, bread is practically the nearest thing we have to an unqualified good. But alas, the amount of unqualifiedly good bread available has probably always been small. For bread making is an art, and truly accomplished artists tend to be few. Still, the pervasiveness of downright bad bread is a national disgrace.
This is not to say that the commercial bread situation is desperate. There are bakeries that are glories of their neighborhoods - some even with old wood- or coal-fired brick ovens - producing loaves that no home baker, however skilled, can equal. A domestic oven, even with a stone slab for baking directly on the bottom of the chamber (which produces a particularly crisp crust), is always a notch or two below a good commercial one.
Hunting out superlative bakeries does take time and effort. But only one step inside a bakery and you'll know something about its quality. A good baker cares as much about the look of the bread as the taste. Is the bread beautifully risen and well-finished? Is the slashing across the top of the loaves deftly done? The true test, of course, comes after you bring the bread home and taste its crust and inner crumb.
Nevertheless, good bread -bread at least as nutritious as anything you can buy in the grocery store and certainly tastier - is within the reach of anyone willing to undertake the making of it at home. Those considerations alone should be enough to persuade you, but there remains an overarching reason. Making your own bread puts you in touch with one of the deepest roots of your humanity, with the prodigious power of the practical intellect. Of all the satisfactions involved in turning out a homemade loaf of yeast bread, the greatest is that of the mind. Not just because you will find delight in the result; more because you will rejoice in the process.
We live in a time when nearly everything from food to furniture, music to humor, is delivered to us finished, demanding no sustained, creative attention. We are not patient with process; we are in a hurry to have, to use and to discard. Yet no great work has ever been done by people interested only in results. The bread maker not delighted with how water turns flour into batter - and with the way more flour turns batter into dough, with the way the mindless time of kneading paradoxically refreshes the mind, with the way the loaf rises in its own sweet time, not ours - will be a one-time baker.
For bread baking is a function of three things: ingredients, equipment and process. And the greatest of these is process. The recipe is the least part of it. Yeast doughs are forgiving to a fault: provided that flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and fat are combined in any but the silliest proportions, a raisable, bakeable loaf is unavoidable.
Bread making, however, while it is indeed a simple process, is also one that is a minefield of vexations and possible mistakes. The permutations and combinations of disaster that can occur with the six ingredients, plus one kneading surface, two pans and an oven, run into the thousands. Cake flour, for example, does not have enough gluten to enable bread to rise properly; all-purpose flour is adequate, but only high-gluten bread flour will produce a majestically high loaf. Sugar and yeast, by contrast, are whimsical. Use too little sugar, the yeast will work slowly; just enough, and it will work fine; use a great deal (as in coffee breads), you will slow it down again.
Or take the matter of temperatures during mixing, kneading or rising. Too little heat makes it take longer for the yeast to do its job; too much heat (over, say, 120 degrees) will kill the yeast. Like a child, it dawdles easily, but it balks utterly at frantic efforts to speed it up. Even freezing will not finish yeast off.
Or take equipment. Not all bread pans are created equal. Shiny aluminum ones will not produce a decent bottom crust, because they reflect radiant heat. Black steel ones, because they absorb the heat, will turn out loaves that are crisp and brown all over, as will glass pans. Cookbooks will tell you these things, but experience will engrave them in your mind. In particular, you must know about ovens. They have minds of their own, minds often given to deception. No thermostatic control settings should be trusted; their mendacity needs to be called to account from time to time by the impartial witness of a reliable thermometer. And there is more. Conventional ovens have hot spots waiting to be discovered. You will need to take the measure of your oven to avoid the worst corners; and, for the best results, you must also shift the loaves around as they bake to keep their color even.
But not to frighten you. If you can bring yourself to relish the process, you have the makings of a baker. And if you bake your own bread, you will receive more than the satisfaction of making friends with creatures as clever as flour and yeast, of learning to knead vigorously and well, of learning to shape loaves dozens of ways. More, even, than the supreme joy of serving a loaf still warm from the oven. You will have at your disposal all the resources of stale, good bread.
Yes, stale. Store-bought fluff grows old gracelessly; homemade bread comes into its own with age. Croutons made of it have substance. French toast made with it is a repas, not a divertissement, and crumbs made from it are more than tasteless dust. An apple brown betty made of homemade bread is heaven. And - to give you one last secret - if you begin your next gazpacho by dousing stale homemade bread in a bowl with plenty of olive oil and a bit of minced garlic, and then add cold water and let it soak in until the bread is soft, and then puree the mixture in a food processor before adding the tomatoes, salt, pepper and sherry vinegar, you will have the best-bodied, best-tasting gazpacho ever.
Bake your own loaves then. You have nothing to lose but your bondage to bread that is not bread.
Beyond the manifold benefits you reap in making bread - the satisfaction of confecting something supremely good all by yourself from start to finish; the entertainment of working with beings as clever as flour, yeast and fire; the blessed mindlessness of the 15 minutes kneading; the magic of the rising . . . There is a deeper consideration still; bread is practically the closest thing in the world to resurrection.