All I Wanted Was Toast...

I am making bread at the moment. Trying to, anyway. This started because I belatedly noticed this AM that the normal butter-tinged and browned crusty component, i.e. toast, was sadly missing from my otherwise fine breakfast of still warm eggs from the coop and nicely browned potatoes with bits of fresh tarragon. The balance was off.

Fortunately Nancy was out of town to attend a conference, so the suffering was confined to only one person. Unfortunately, that person was me. I thought of delaying the proceedings until Some Bread could be made, but thought better of it. Base hunger and a thrifty desire not to waste the succulent taters and eggs forced me to eat immediately. But as they say, there is always tomorrow. And on that inevitably upcoming morn, some dern tasty toast would be lovely.

Motivated after downing my otherwise delicious but breadless breakfast, I mixed up a nice dough, added the granular yeast and a bit of salt, and some savory marjoram to make a nice herbal loaf. I attentively worked the KitchenAid to make the dough satiny and full of gluten. I even warmed a small crock for the little yeast cells to grow in cozily with warmth and moisture. I came back several hours later to check progress, expecting to find a satisfyingly expanded mass of yeasty, glossy dough ready for firing.

Nuthin! The dough was supple and satiny as it should be but had not grown a bit. It was like flaccid pizza dough with flecks of herbs. It felt good to the touch but also seemed to lack that live quality that characterizes good bread dough.

Clearly the yeast had not activated. Could the yeast be dead? One of the intricacies of bread-making is to calculate the amount of salt to put in the dough. Too much and the yeast dies. Too little and the resulting bread tastes flat. Dreading the result, I tasted the dough, expecting to find a salty mess. Nope. It seemed nicely doughy but not too salty. Hrrrm...

In the old days, bakers would "proof" the yeast to make sure it was working before committing it to their hard-worked dough. But nowadays, with industrial quality controls, impervious packaging, safe storage methods etc., we don't bother with that step. We count on our yeast to be lively and ready to kick ass right out of the gate. But perhaps this yeast in some way had seen the end of it's productive days. Heat and light can kill yeast cells. Maybe mine had a case of sunburn.

To test this theory, I put a little warm water in a glass, sprinkled some of the brownish grains into a glass of warm water, and added honey as a culinary incentive to the little cells. Normally, the organic sugars and nutrients in honey are like the feast of Valhalla to the tiny but voracious and vigorous vikings of yeast. Modern quick yeast is quick to imbibe sugars, resulting in rapid multiplication of the colony and plenty of carbon dioxide bubbles as the useful waste product. But this stuff merely sat in the bottom of the glass in a glum mass. Well, I thought, maybe this is tired yeast and just needs a bit of a kick start. It certainly had all the incentives for a vigorous comeback. I checked back 10 minutes later, expecting to see a fine crop of bubbles. Nuthin'.

Puzzled, I concluded that the yeast was dead, and got out the vacuum pak of Red Star Yeast I've been saving in the refrigerator against just such an emergency. Bypassing the lackluster yeast, I thought I’d just mix in some fresh troops and save the loaf. But something wasn’t right.

Still flummoxed, I pondered the jar containing those granular particles that had so totally failed to rise or make bubbles even when encouraged. It seemed a shame to waste all that dead yeast, so I began to sprinkle it onto the scraps of potato peelings and vegetable scraps being saved for the chickens. A little waft of smell came into the nostrils. A mellow, sweetish smell. I tentatively tipped a wet finger into the stuff and tasted. Sweet!

Oh for crying out loud. This was not yeast. It was that granular and weird form of brown sugar designed not to clump up. Ye gods. No wonder it didn't rise. It couldn't. It was fuel for yeast, not the magic substance itself. But it looks EXACTLY like dry yeast.

I'd like to say that I laughed at myself indulgently for this error but that isn't true. I was in fact chagrined, ticked off and feeling quite stupid. These sentiments gave rise to some philosophizing about how all true learning is accompanied by failure and pain. At the moment, the failure and pain part was apparent, but not the learning part. Feeling a bit mystified and blue, I made myself a little compensatory beverage which involved ice cubes. One cube made it off the countertop and into the wild blue yonder.

Having just cleaned up the entire kitchen, I got out the flour and mixer and set out to incorporate the trusty Red Star yeast into the perfectly satiny but flat dough. Bakers revere that satin look and I knew that adding water would make the dough sticky and yucky. And I was fairly certain that a faint coating of flour would appear on all the newly cleaned surfaces as a result. But there was no recourse. I added warm water, flour to absorb it, and new yeast.

Nicely, after some KitchenAid whirrings and a bit of hand-kneading, the new dough was ready for re-rising. It was even satiny! I lifted my glass and savored a bit of conquest, hoping that a sturdy well-risen loaf would soon be ready for baking.

Around the corner came the Rocket Dog, yelping and pirouetting. In her mouth was the errant ice cube. She dropped it provocatively in front of me, then as I turned to meet the challenge, she picked it up and raced away. Obligingly I gave chase. We went around the living room and over the sofa in a series of circles and dodges. It was no contest, as usual. She has four legs to my two.

It's great fun to give chase to my diminutive canine companion, but it’s always a bit sobering. She weighs 11 pounds and is in top form, from having chased rabbits and squirrels all winter. I weigh over 230, and can only lumber about. The contrast is embarrassing. Needless to say, I never indulge her when anyone else is about, save my ever-tolerant wife and a few very good friends. The Rocket Dog got under the table, where I cannot go without suffering bruised knees, and demurely dared me to go after her. I was tempted to attempt a trump of her feminine wiles, but I am wise to her tactics and walked away. Brains over brawn, I thought fuzzily, in a bit of a metaphorical mashup. Put simply, this didn’t work.

Eventually, she found a place of attack. The ice cube ended up in a corner and with much growling and precise stalking technique, she re-captured the ice cube. It was by this time much diminished, and Dog conquered all with a lick and a chomp.

She went to sleep, I did things on my computer. As you have surely intuited, time passed. I checked: the dough had risen! (rose?)

Optimistically, I set the oven to 500 degrees. Now for the final forming of the dough.

In the forests of France many years ago, peasants found a nice way to contain rising dough. They took reeds and formed them into round baskets, into which to place dough to rise. When the dough was ready, they would invert the baskets, plopping the dough onto flat wooden shovels (called, oddly enough, peels) and slide them into the community oven to bake. This method makes intriguingly spiraled patterns on the surface of the bread, and is an honorable and classic method.

I have one of those reed baskets. I thought it would be craftsmanlike and attractive to make my own intriguingly spiraled bread. However, no one had told me how to keep the dough from sticking to the basket when you try to "plop' it over onto the peel.

As you no doubt infer, I've had many difficulties with perfectly risen dough that totally collapses when trying to pry sticky dough out of that infernal basket. I've studied "The Bread Baker's Apprentice," by Peter Reinhart, and other expert sources for a solution to this problem,to no satisfactory conclusion. In the end, I just load up the basket with flour and hope for the best.

Thankfully, this time it worked. Plopped the dough over onto the peel. No problem! Nice spirals of flour on the surface. Slid the dough into the oven and onto the stone. I say “stone” as if I have a purpose-built wood-fired stone floored hearth oven a la Poilane, but it’s really just a very large square ceramic flooring tile I got from a discount building supply warehouse for $3.95. But it works pretty well, especially if the oven is heated up for 30 minutes prior to baking.

Threw some water into the oven to make steam. This is a great trick: the steam makes the crust crisp and toasty.

Time again passed. Nothing with bread is fast. Eventually, the oven began exuding a delicious yeasty and slightly acrid aroma, an olfactory signal that I’ve learned means that the bread is becoming ready.

Rocket Dog jumped into my lap for a bit of connection and love. While she licked my face caringly, I asked myself the eternal question. No, not one of those why are we here in the universe questions, but the bread baker's question: Is the loaf done?

In Reinhart's charming description of the boulangerie of Lionel Poilane, arguably the best bread baker in Paris and thus the world, we learn that their bakers use only wood-fired ovens, and determine the correct baking temperature by tossing bits of parchment into the hot oven, and counting the seconds until the paper explodes into flame. Given the correct temperature, it is only a matter of a given number of minutes to baking perfection.

Lacking parchment and the correct second-count, I had no idea how long to bake the loaf. It smelled great, but I’ve been fooled before into taking out the loaf before it’s time, only to end up with a soggy mid-section. There's only one way to really know if the loaf is done: take it's temperature. It should be at least 205.

After throwing out 3 cheap digital thermometers after each one unexpectedly ceased working properly, I asked Santa for a professional temperature gauge. Santa answered and now I own a marvelously accurate and sturdy tool, lab-tested and guaranteed accurate from -58 to +572 degrees. I inserted the probe into the loaf and watched the little digits race upwards until they steadied and stopped. Ah! 205 degrees internal. Perfect.

Moving from modern technology to that of ancient peoples, I used the wooden peel to bring the loaf out of the oven and reverently placed it on a rack to cool. It smelled wonderful, and looked even better. When I say, “reverently,” it's not an abuse of the word. Breadmaking is a mystical art, and when one gets it to work well, it's a somewhat religious experience. Just try it without using a bread-making machine or a loaf pan, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now then. Here we are. The Rocket Dog is asleep, there's some nice stew in the crock pot. The aroma of just-baked bread fills the kitchen. A bit of stew, a break of bread and a glass of wine will make a satisfying little dinner.

















As Emeril LaGasse often says on his cooking show, I wish you had Smell-o-Vision. This loaf with it's "intriguingly spiraled pattern" is alive with rich aromas of herbs and wheat. If you could only smell it! Alas, a picture will have to do.