52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  The bread clinging to the crust was every bit as good. It wasn’t white, wasn’t whole wheat; it was something in between, and it had a rustic quality—a coarse texture that managed to be light and airy, with plenty of holes, yet also had real substance and a satisfying resistance to the bite. This bread didn’t ball up in your mouth like white bread, and like the crust, it was yeasty and just slightly sweet, and it exhaled (yes, the bread exhaled) an incredible perfume that, cartoon-like, wafted up from the table, did a curl, and, it seemed, levitated me from the table. I was seduced, body and soul, my senses overloaded. This bread demanded the attention of more than the taste buds: it was a delight to the eyes, the nose, and the tongue as well. But years later, what I remember most about this moment is the utter surprise, the almost mystical revelation that bread could be this good. True, I had grown up with plastic-wrapped white bread, but I’d also had the occasional baguette or decent restaurant bread and had never tasted anything like this.

  “Excuse me?” I finally realized that Anne was talking to me.

  “I said, how’s the bread?”

  “I think you’d better try it.”

  When the waiter brought my eggs Benedict (at a price that should have included the rest of the chicken), I asked him what kind of bread this was.

  “I think we call it peasant bread.”

  Peasant bread! This was the stuff of kings. “I’ve got to learn to make this,” I said to Anne as we left the restaurant.

  ——————————————

  That was five or six or more years ago. I hadn’t learned to make it, though I’d tried half-heartedly, and I hadn’t tasted bread anywhere near as good since. It seemed likely that if I was ever going to have the kind of bread I wanted to eat, I was going to have to apply myself. And I’d better do it soon; I feared that if I waited much longer, I’d forget what the perfect loaf tasted like. As it was, it was going to be difficult enough to reconstruct those complex tastes, textures, and aromas, and I figured it was now or never.

  That makes it all sound like a very pragmatic undertaking, like growing tomatoes simply because they taste better than store-bought. Bread, however, is such a loaded food, full of symbolism and rich in history, whose very preparation produces what surely must be the most recognizable food aroma in the world, that it arguably occupies its own shelf in the food hierarchy.

  This was made shockingly clear from a newspaper story I’d recently come across while munching on a slice of toast. The New York Times reported that Sunni militants in Baghdad had come up with a horrifying new strategy, every bit as effective as car bombs and sniper fire, to force Shiites out of targeted neighborhoods.

  Kill all the bakers.

  The toll so far was a dozen and counting, as militants systematically hunted down the bakers, closing one bakery after another by killing, kidnapping, or threatening those who made the bread. The attacks often took place in broad daylight, the customers left unharmed. The militants didn’t have to kill them; without bread, they left the neighborhood on their own. “To shut down a well-known bakery in a neighborhood, that means you paralyze life there,” one baker said.

  I was shocked that bread, in the twenty-first century, still occupied such a major social—and now political—role. How little I understood about this alchemy of wheat, water, yeast, and salt. I suppose this story might have turned me off to bread, discouraging me from what I fully expected to be a lighthearted kitchen fling, but it apparently had the opposite effect, providing me with the final nudge I needed. I wanted to understand bread, to bake exceptional bread more than ever, to become a baker.

  “I’m going to make bread every week for a year,” I announced to my family not long afterward, “until I bake the perfect loaf of peasant bread.”

  “Every week—great! What other kinds of bread are you going to make?” Katie, sixteen, wondered.

  “Nothing. Just peasant bread.”

  Her face fell.

  “I wouldn’t mind some croissants.”

  “Or pizza,” Zach, home from college for the week, added. “Cinnamon buns . . . stuffed bread . . . baguettes . . .”

  “Peasant bread,” I said flatly. “It may take me a year to perfect it.”

  “I think your bread’s pretty good now,” Katie offered.

  “It’s too dense and moist, and it has no air holes. And you need a hacksaw to cut through the crust,” I said, trying not to show my irritation at the compliment.

  “Well, that’s true about the crust . . .”

  So true that the kids refused to slice my loaves themselves, it was so difficult—not to mention hazardous.

  “Fifty-two weeks of peasant bread, huh?” Zach said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “Sorry I’ll be missing that, Dad.”

  “I’ll make sure you come home a year from now to the perfect loaf.”

  I said this with confidence even though I’m not very good at resolutions and had already failed miserably at a dozen or so prior attempts to make this bread. Regardless, this seemed an eminently achievable goal. I wasn’t planning on mastering the violin or learning particle physics. I was merely baking a loaf of bread, and this time, I told myself, would be different. I would be disciplined and methodical; I would take a scientific approach; I would talk to bakers and read books; and mainly I would stay focused, keep my eye on the prize and my ass in the kitchen and not get diverted by interesting but irrelevant distractions, my usual undoing.

  “I’ve got a year to learn,” I said with a mix of cockiness and trepidation, aware that I was staring down the eight-hundred-pound gorilla’s flared nostrils. “Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two loaves. I’m going to bake the perfect loaf of bread in a year. End of story.”

  Actually, beginning of story.

  II.

  Lauds

  This prayer breathes the atmosphere of bright youth, of beginning, of innocence, of blossoming spring. It is a joyful, optimistic hour reflected by the hymn, psalms and canticles.

  WEEK

  1

  Bake Like an Egyptian

  Acorns were good until bread was found.

  —Sir Francis Bacon

  Weight: 196 pounds

  Bread bookshelf weight:* 2 pounds

  I needed a recipe.

  Right now. I had somehow arrived at the advent of fifty-two weeks of baking, poised at the very threshold of my project, without having yet decided on a recipe for the first loaf. This oversight was no trifling matter. The inaugural loaf was important: It would be the benchmark against which all the other loaves would be measured, the starting point upon which fifty-one subsequent loaves would be built. This was my foundation, my touchstone, the zeroing of my scale, the calibration of my gas meter, the—

  You get the point.

  “I need a recipe,” I said. Aloud. To myself. The nice thing about baking alone in the kitchen before dawn is that you can talk to yourself like a crazy person and no one suspects you’re a crazy person. I considered my options. There really aren’t that many differences in bread formulas; the variations are mainly in technique. The basic recipe for bread has been around now for about—well, let’s see, this is the seventeenth . . . minus . . . hmm . . . borrow a one . . . that leaves—six thousand years, which means the copyright has expired and I can repeat it here:

  Mix flour, water, salt, and yeast. Let rise, then form a loaf and bake.

  This recipe (or something close to it) was found scratched on the inside of a pyramid. It turns out that Egypt, in addition to its more widely known contributions to civilization—the Sphinx, hieroglyphics, Omar Sharif—also gave us bread. Plus something to wash it down with (more about that in a moment). Yet the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to eat wheat. Early forms of wheat, including emmer and einkorn, had been domesticated in the Fertile Crescent since Neolithic times. Most commonly, these grains were cooked with water and eaten as gruel. Eventually it occurred to someone to press the gruel into a disk shape and grill it on a hot stone, and flatbread was born (i
f the inventor had realized that said innovation would culminate in the McDonald’s Snack Wrap, he might have buried it with Tutankhamen).

  That might have been the end of it, were it not for another culinary invention of the Egyptians. They liked to tip a cold one back now and then (or, more likely, a warm one) and had numerous small breweries where they cultivated brewer’s yeast. Now, maybe it happened this way and maybe it didn’t, but it seems quite likely that one day a tipsy cook spilled a little beer into the dough, and the inevitable happened: yeast and dough were accidentally mixed, and leavened bread was born.*

  It didn’t take long for bread—an obvious improvement over gruel—to become a staple of the Middle Eastern diet. Bread makes a pretty complete food. The wheat kernel, or seed, provides protein, starch, fat, and fiber and is rich in a number of important vitamins. Bread became such a major part of life in Egypt, with laborers paid in loaves, that this food would come to be known, in Egyptian Arabic, as aish, literally “life.”

  I rather fancied the notion that I was trying to perfect life and that my method for doing so wasn’t appreciably different from that of Pharaoh’s baker. My life would have no more than four simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. I would make my life free-form, without a pan, directly on a stone in the oven.

  Of course, to make a loaf, I needed a little more to go on than a hieroglyphic scrawl. The day after my bread epiphany in that upper-crust restaurant, I’d called my younger brother, Rob, and told him I wanted to learn to bake bread. He was a pretty fair baker himself, and my request might have triggered some sibling rivalry—if it were me, I’d have been tempted to borrow a page from our grandmother’s book and leave out one crucial ingredient (like salt)—but Rob welcomed me into the fraternity of home bakers, giving me his complete recipe (as far as I know), his encouragement, and, shortly after, my first artisan bread cookbook.

  I had been tinkering on and off with Rob’s recipe, keeping track of the variations and results in a log, but it looked to be an evolutionary dead end: the bread had changed, but it was never as good as Rob’s, let alone the sublime object of my desire. I’ve mentioned the rock-hard crust, but the crumb—the term bakers use to describe the texture of the bread’s interior, not the little bits that fall to the table—was just as bad. No matter how much or how little yeast I added, how long or how short the rising time, or how long I left the bread in the oven, the loaves invariably had a dense, undercooked crumb most notable for its complete lack of gas pockets. Frustrated, I’d stopped baking bread altogether over a year earlier.

  “All right,” I finally announced on this morning of renaissance. “The last shall be first.” Meaning I’d begin this touchstone loaf by using the same recipe I’d used for the last loaf I’d baked. Following this latest variation of Rob’s recipe, I began by mixing the flours, mostly all-purpose white flour, with a little whole wheat and rye for flavor. I took about a third of this flour mixture and added it to all the water, along with a mere teaspoon of active dry yeast, making a batter called a sponge or poolish (the word most likely refers to the Polish bakers who introduced this method to France in the nineteenth century). I then let the poolish—with the consistency of thin pancake batter—sit. After four or five hours, it would be aromatic and bubbly, full of complex compounds that would contribute flavor and aroma to the finished bread. Only then would I mix in the rest of the flour and salt and knead the dough.

  Use of a preferment, as the poolish and other methods (such as a biga or a pâte fermentée) are called, is a technique you won’t find in your mother’s copy of Fannie Farmer or likely even at your local bakery, where a “straight dough”—in which everything is mixed at once, kneaded, and set aside to rise—is generally the rule. A straight dough is a much faster way to make bread and lends itself well to automation.

  The Egyptians didn’t have to worry about preferments, as their bread was leavened by saving a little of today’s dough to use in tomorrow’s bread—the original preferment. Most modern bakers start from scratch with fresh commercial yeast for each new batch, but this just doesn’t provide the kind of flavor that old yeast brings to the table. The poolish, even though it is started with fresh yeast, is one way to recapture some of that lost flavor, to bake more like an Egyptian.

  Thanks to the custom of decorating their tombs with paintings of everyday life and their penchant for record keeping, we actually know more about how Egyptians baked four thousand years ago than we do about baking in, say, medieval England. We know, for example, that during the thirty-year reign of Ramses III, his royal bakery distributed 7 million loaves of bread to the temples. We know how the bread was made; a detailed tomb painting of the bakery illustrates every phase of the process, including a detail of a large trough of dough being kneaded by foot. We know that Egyptian bakers had a repertoire of over fifteen varieties of bread. They had round breads, braided breads, even breads shaped like pyramids; breads with poppy seeds and sesame seeds; and bread with camphor.

  And yet here I was, thousands of years later, restricting myself for the next year to a single type of loaf, with just four ingredients. I was baking like an Egyptian, but less so. There’s nothing like progress.

  WEEK

  2

  Naturally Pure and Wholesome

  Wildlife experts in Scotland have urged the public to help save swans by feeding them brown loaves instead of white. A lack of nutrients in white bread is leaving the birds crippled with a condition similar to rickets in humans.

  —The Scotsman, February 15, 2008

  It’s a sad state of affairs when the only thing you have to read over breakfast is a bag of flour.

  Thanks to Anne, I’ve become so accustomed to having the New York Times delivered early every morning—home delivery was a de facto condition of our marriage—that when I beat the person we used to call “the paper boy” to the kitchen and have nothing to read over breakfast, I go a little stir crazy and will read anything: I’ll peruse the back of the cereal box for the tenth time (just in case it’s changed or they have a new mail-in offer); I’ll study the junk mail to see what the local Chinese food buffet place is offering for their special, romantic Valentine’s Day buffet (all-you-can-eat king crab legs, in case you’re wondering what turns a girl on—just try to keep those specks of crab off your cheek); I will in fact even read a flour bag to stave off Times withdrawal.

  Thanks, as I say, to Anne. I’ll admit that I was attracted to Anne some twenty-five years ago by her looks, but I became intrigued when I saw her reading the Times over lunch one day at the Office where we both worked. Suffice it to say, I hadn’t dated a lot of women who read anything more challenging than TV Guide, much less the Times. Thus Anne’s reading this paper in front of me so blatantly was the erotic equivalent of an ovulating baboon displaying her swollen red rump, and I eventually worked up the courage to ask her to lunch, figuring that at the least we’d have something to talk about. Which we did.

  Not long after, Anne left the research institute where I still work today to begin medical school, and we subsequently married, had two kids, yada yada, and as Anne was finishing up her residency in internal medicine in the Bronx, we were eager (well, I was eager) to move to a more rural area. Anne was willing to indulge me, to follow me anywhere—almost. She had merely one nonnegotiable demand. One evening after the kids were in bed, she came over to the regional map I was studying at the kitchen table and drew a rough circle, indicating the approximate home-delivery limit of the Times.

  “Anywhere inside the circle is fine,” she said, smiling.

  Fair enough. I found a small town in the Mid-Hudson Valley, just inside the northern edge of the circle, and indeed, before closing on the house, Anne called the paper to make sure the address was in their delivery area. Seventeen years later, Bobbie Davis still tosses the paper onto (or close to) our patio, 365 days a year.

  So what does this have to do with the price of bread, as they say? Well, I was downstairs at five thirty to start the pooli
sh and I was going a little nuts because the paper hadn’t come yet, giving me nothing to read over breakfast. Nothing but a bag of King Arthur flour. It turns out there’s a lot to read on a bag of King Arthur, a northeastern brand highly regarded by both commercial and serious home bakers. I learned from the bag that the company is 100 percent employee-owned. There was a glowing testimonial from “I. M.” (hmm . . . sounds like an inside gag: “I. M. really the CEO”) plus a greeting from the president, and a recipe. I read the slogan “Naturally Pure and Wholesome” and saw that King Arthur flour was “Never Bleached. Never Bromated.” That was reassuring. Much of the flour sold in America is still treated with peroxides and/or bromides at the mill—practices outlawed in the European Union owing to overwhelming evidence of the carcinogenic properties of these chemicals, used to both whiten the flour (pure, fresh flour has a creamy color) and “age” it (artificial aging is cheaper than storing the flour for several weeks while it undergoes natural oxidation), which improves the baking properties.

  Finally I turned the bag to its side and read the small print near the bottom.

  Ingredients: Unbleached hard wheat flour, malted barley flour (a natural yeast food), niacin (a B vitamin), reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate (vitamin B 1), riboflavin (vitamin B 2), folic acid (a B vitamin).

  Odd. If it was so “naturally pure and wholesome,” why was it loaded up with all those B vitamins?

  I thought about other enriched foods we eat. Some breakfast cereals contain the equivalent of a multivitamin for marketing purposes, but among the staple foods, milk (with added vitamin D) and salt (with iodine) were the only others that came to mind. And they have only a single additive. Was this just King Arthur’s thing? I pulled another bag of flour, a generic brand, from our cupboard. Same ingredients.