52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  I tried not to show my alarm. Things were escalating rapidly. Anne was supposed to be my brake, reining in my harebrained schemes, not feeding them! Of course, the idea of a kitchen hearth, a waist-height wood-fired oven, was appealing. We love our living room fireplace but hardly get to use it, since, like most Americans, we practically live in the kitchen. As she dreamily spoke of a hearth, its glowing embers warming a chill snowy morning, I searched hard for an antidote.

  “I think those are more for pizza than bread.”

  Anne frowned.

  “And I don’t think our hundred-year-old house can handle a ten-ton oven.”

  Truth was, neither could my half-century-old body, but it seemed that the project was now on the table. Before I laid the first brick, however, I figured I’d better try one out first, and a little digging had uncovered the fact that one of the coauthors of The Bread Builders, Alan Scott, who was also considered the nation’s premier outdoor wood-fired masonry bread oven expert, proselytizer, and apostle for baking bread in outdoor wood-fired masonry ovens, had built one at a farm less than a dough-proofing away.

  The oven’s owner was at first understandably cautious upon hearing my request. After all, she was running a production bakery.

  “How many loaves do you want to bake?” Nina asked.

  “Oh, just one two-pound loaf. I’m baking a loaf a week for a year.”

  I heard her giggle through the phone.

  “You’re only baking one loaf at a time?” She could barely contain herself. “How cute.”

  Cute? I was having an existential crisis a week over this single loaf. Producing each loaf was like giving birth, every weekend, over and over, except that Mama was disappointed with every newborn, and Nina was treating this as if it were a mere dalliance, a trifle!

  “You can bake five or six loaves and freeze them, you know.”

  What did she think I had at home—a commercial Hobart mixer? I was having a hard enough time with one loaf, thank you very much. Plus, we could barely consume the bread I was baking now. If I baked a half-dozen loaves every weekend, we’d each be eating nearly a loaf of bread a day, like medieval monks.

  In any event, once she stopped laughing, she agreed to let me bring my dough to her oven—and, by extension, her baker—the following week. I prepared for the big day by doing an overnight poolish in the refrigerator, then taking it out at six o’clock the next morning and letting it ferment a few more hours at room temperature. At ten thirty I kneaded and started the first rise. I was aiming for the loaf to go into the oven around two o’clock, with the second rise taking place at the bakery. After an hour of driving, though, I seemed to be lost. I had expected to be in the country, but this was new, dreary suburbia, sixty miles from the nearest city, a hodgepodge of luxury homes built on dead-end streets without sidewalks, all with names ending in Lane or Court. Where in this neighborhood could there possibly be a two-hundred-acre dairy farm?

  I dialed the farm’s number on my cell phone. No answer. As I was considering turning back and abandoning the mission, I rounded a corner, and looming before me, as incongruous as a skyscraper, rose a single silo, filling the windshield with its silent majesty, its strength, its courage standing tall in the midst of development, taking my breath away.

  I had arrived.

  ——————————————

  I’d been looking forward to meeting the baker as much as meeting the oven. This would be my first encounter with a professional baker, and what better way to start than with an old-world, wood-fired hearth-oven baker, someone whom I imagined to be a heavyset man in a soiled, sweat-stained T-shirt, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, a real veteran of the flour wars. Or perhaps Nicolas Cage. As we’d be spending several hours together, I anticipated being regaled with tales of his baker’s life and pumping him for information. I’d even rehearsed how to ask him to be my teacher, my mentor, my very savior.

  Nina led me into the bakery. “This is our baker,” she said cheerfully.

  Where? The only person here was a wisp of a girl with a smudge of flour on her nose, a twenty-two-year-old whose face radiated the earnest openness and innocence of a farm girl from Indiana. Which is exactly what she was. Surely she wasn’t the only baker.

  “Oh, no,” the young woman, whose name was Lindsay, said when I asked if she worked alone. She introduced me to another woman of about the same age, an intern, who was loading the oven. Their combined ages were a decade less than mine. Lindsay had been an intern herself until four weeks earlier, when the baker quit and she inherited the job. She’d been baking for all of a month. “Let’s see how it looks,” she said, taking my loaf into the proofing room, a chilled room full of trays of dough, buckets of sourdough, and racks of proofing loaves.

  I shivered. “I didn’t know to bring a sweater.” Like most home bakers, I’d been following the conventional wisdom by proofing in a warm area (the classic instruction is to proof in an oven with the pilot light on).

  “It’s actually a little warm in here today,” Lindsay said, looking at the thermometer, which read sixty-seven. “We like to keep the temperature in the low sixties so we can do a long, slow fermentation and proofing. It gives you more flavor.” She poked my dough. “I think you can form the loaf now.”

  Swallowing my pride and putting aside the thought that I’d been married longer than she’d been alive, I asked her to watch and critique. She wasn’t impressed with my boule-forming technique.

  “I usually do this,” she said, half dragging, half rolling the dough across the table in a circular motion to develop surface tension and keep the loaf together. Her hands moved naturally and skillfully across the table. My dough was a little dry, she noted politely, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  I dropped the boule into my colander and watched Lindsay work, struggling to stay out of her way in the tight quarters. Whatever disappointment I’d initially felt at the fact that my tutor wasn’t a seasoned baker melted away as I watched this kid moving confidently and quickly through the trays of dough, all in different stages of development, dividing, weighing, forming loaves, and loading the oven, keeping up a line of chatter and cheerfully answering my dopey questions all the while. I asked her about a couple of techniques I’d read about. One, known by its French name, autolyse, involves resting the dough for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes before kneading it. This method, developed a quarter century ago by the French bread scientist Raymond Calvel, was reputed to produce a superior crumb and better flavor by essentially “conditioning” the gluten before kneading. Such a dough requires less kneading, which results in less oxygen being incorporated, which makes better bread, say proponents.

  “It works,” she said, “but I don’t know why.” Interesting. I had tried it once and couldn’t see any difference whatsoever in the bread.

  How had Lindsay picked up more baking expertise in a month than I had in five years? Perhaps part of the answer lay in the math. She was baking twenty-five hundred loaves of bread a week. Was I wasting my time on books, theory, farming, and research, when I should just be baking bread, lots of it, every day? I had some thinking to do. But first I had a single loaf of bread to bake in a wood-fired masonry oven.

  I was eager to start, but we had to wait both for my bread and for the oven to be ready. Lindsay checked the digital thermocouple. “Six eighty,” she said. “Still a little hot for a boule.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. It was three o’clock in the afternoon; Lindsay had been baking bread in the oven all day, opening the door frequently, mopping out the hearth, moving loaves in and out, and the oven, which had not received a lick of fuel since the previous night’s fire, was still nearly 700 degrees. Clearly the ten tons of masonry was doing the job. Unlike conventional ovens, which heat the food, a wood-fired masonry oven heats the masonry—the brick—and it is this heat, slowly released from the huge mass of masonry long after the fire is out, that bakes the bread.* As loaves went in and came out—the narrow
baguette-shaped loaves can be baked at higher temperatures than boules—the oven gradually cooled to about 640 degrees at the flue, meaning the temperature at the base, where the bread sits, was about 540 degrees. If I baked a loaf of bread with my home oven that hot, I’d end up with a charred round of raw dough, but Lindsay pronounced the oven ready.

  She loaded in her own boules, letting me handle a couple. She even offered to let me slash them, which I declined, as I didn’t want to render any of her bread unmarketable with my clumsy slashes. Slashing the loaf with a sharp knife or razor just moments before it goes into the oven produces those lovely grignes— the cuts in a loaf that can vary from a decorative pattern to cresting waves of crust—that open up in the oven. Baguettes traditionally have overlapping diagonal slashes, while many boules, including mine, receive a crosshatch, like a tic-tac-toe grid. The loaves that come from the famous Poilâne Bakery in Paris are carved with their signature script P. These cuts aren’t just decorative, however. A loaf that is not slashed (and I speak from experience) will burst open at the weakest point. Slashing allows for controlled expansion during the oven-spring phase, when the gases produced by the yeast are expanding rapidly.

  Back in my kitchen, I had what I thought was a professional lame—a ten-dollar model consisting of a razor blade permanently molded (read “nonreplaceable”) into a plastic handle—but Lindsay handed me her truly professional lame, a cheap, replaceable double-edged razor blade threaded onto a flimsy strip of metal, and following her advice to slash quickly, without hesitation or too much thought, I made four cuts across my own loaf, which I slipped into the oven. Lindsay grabbed a ninety-nine-cent plant mister—the very one I’d rejected as being ineffective—and gave the oven walls a quick spritz.

  The baking day was winding down, with only one batch of bread left after this, and I could sense the atmosphere changing, the pace slowing, as weary smiles started to appear on the tired faces of the bakers. A steady rain fell on the tin roof above our heads, making conversation almost impossible. Lindsay stepped out into the downpour and reappeared a few minutes later with a wheelbarrow full of firewood. She was soaking wet, the rain on her floury skin giving her the look of a loaf that had just been spritzed in the oven.

  Lindsay weighed out the wood needed for that night’s fire—exactly 175 pounds’ worth (bakers weigh everything, I noticed)—which would bake tomorrow’s bread. The last baking task of her long day would be to start the fire before leaving the bakery.

  Now, for the first time in the entire afternoon, there really was nothing to do but wait for the loaves. The rain continued to fall as the light faded from the room. When the intern materialized with a wine bottle, my own fatigue suddenly evaporated. A glass of wine sounded lovely. Except that the bottle held olive oil. Lindsay poured some into a bowl and grabbed a bread knife and a small loaf made with left over dough. A stick of homemade butter came out of the fridge. Good, fresh unsalted butter has a clean taste that enhances the flavor of bread, and this butter, spread on the slightly warm bread, was extraordinary. I actually felt a little drunk as I let the bread and butter play on my tongue, trying to absorb every bit of flavor before swallowing.

  A few slices later, Lindsay took my loaf out of the oven. “It’s singing!” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Listen!”

  Sure enough, the bread was crackling, as the hot crust, a beautiful dark brown with shades of caramel and molasses, came into contact with the cooler air.

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s a very good thing,” she said, laughing.

  No doubt about it, this was the most beautiful loaf I’d ever baked. It had sprung like never before in the oven; even my slashes, usually disastrous, had come out perfectly. I could hardly wait for it to cool to slice it open and see if the crumb matched the promise of the crust.

  I thanked Lindsay and stepped out into a beautiful late afternoon, washed of dust and doubt, full of hope and optimism, as a wisp of a rainbow appeared in the east, exactly in the direction I was driving.

  I followed it home, smiling the entire time.

  III.

  Terce

  A Latin term for third hour. One prays for light and strength as the day waxes strong and one’s work begins.

  WEEK

  11

  Goddisgoode

  I beg you . . . to bear in mind that my observations and opinions are only the result of my own impulse and curiosity and that there are in this town no amateurs who, like me, dabble in this art.

  —Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, letter to the Royal Society, 1673

  Weight: 199 pounds

  Bread bookshelf weight: 18 pounds

  “Anne, can you bring home your microscope for the weekend?”

  She just stared at me, unblinking.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked. “I’ll be careful with it.” Anne is a physician of the old-fashioned sort who still looks at slides (of what, I’d rather not know) under a microscope and has a nice one in her Office.

  “It’s not that. What do you want to look at?”

  What was this all about? Oh, right, the last time I had borrowed her microscope was twenty years earlier. Exactly. How do I know that? Because Zach was now nineteen. In the second year of our marriage, after having unprotected sex, oh, five or six times with no results of the reproductive variety, I was positive I was sterile. Perhaps it was my concern about the really hot baths I love to take or some painful but temporary sports injuries down there, but I think my hypochondria was mainly the result of having had it drummed into my head since junior high school health class that only two things can happen when you have intercourse: pregnancy and disease. The third possibility, that most of the time you’d simply have some fun, was somehow never mentioned.

  Thus when I spilled a little of my seed onto a microscope slide, my stomach was tied up in a knot. I really, really wanted kids. I wanted to coach Little League teams; I wanted Kennedy-style touch football games on the lawn. Yet as I peered through the lens and twisted the focus knob forward, then backward, I saw . . . nothing. My worst fears were confirmed: I was sterile. “I knew it,” I groused as I slumped into a chair. “Now what are we going to do?”

  Anne peered through the microscope as she fiddled with the knobs. “Come take a look,” she said. I gloomily dragged myself back to the instrument.

  Holy smokes! There were dozens, no, hundreds, no, zillions, of my little guys swimming around like mad. It looked just like the health class movies. “Let’s go!” I yelled, dragging Anne out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom. “We’re celebrating. I can make babies!”

  And not long afterward, I did. Twice. (For the record, I never coached Little League and couldn’t ever interest anyone in touch football, but we had fun all the same.) This time around, once I’d explained that I simply wanted to play voyeur to a little yeast sex, Anne was relieved. The fact that I had in my lifetime asked to borrow her microscope, though, on exactly two occasions, both times involving reproduction, did not escape her attention.

  Why pull out the microscope? Well, the bread baked last week in Bobolink’s brick oven had, I am sorry to report, the same lousy, dense crumb under the gorgeous (and delicious) crust. In previous weeks, the water business had been a red herring; I had decreased the amount of yeast, changed the steam, changed the oven, and changed the flour, yet my loaves were still moist and devoid of holes. Frankly I was running out of ideas.

  But not curiosity. I like science and had in fact wanted to be a doctor back in the day, but a C–in organic chemistry and a major in English literature from a state university didn’t have medical schools fighting over me. According to Anne and the kids, this is the best thing that ever happened to me (and my community), and I have to concede that Anne, as an internist, speaks with some credibility on the matter.

  “You would’ve hated medicine,” she reminds me every time I bring it up, careful not to say that I would’ve been a terrible doctor, though I’m sure she believes that as wel
l.

  “I can just hear you, Dad,” Zach adds. “‘Suck it up and stop whining! Next!’”

  “You have no patience,” Katie invariably chimes in. “And you don’t like talking to people.”

  No patience? Well, I’d show her. We were going to do a little patient science in our own kitchen laboratory this morning. “Come on, Katie,” I said in my most enthusiastic let’s-go-out-and-play voice. “We’re going to watch a little yeast sex!”

  “Cool.”

  “Really, dear . . .”

  Since none of the previous experiments had produced gas holes, I decided to look to the yeast. After all, it’s the yeast that produces the gas that makes the holes, but that was about where my knowledge ended. I wanted to know more and even see the process in action.

  I wasn’t alone in not knowing much about yeast. For roughly fifty-nine of the sixty or so centuries that bakers have been making bread, they did so without knowing what yeast even was—not just how it worked, but even what it was. It wasn’t until the eve of the Civil War, after the invention of the steam engine, photography, and even vaccination, nearly a full century after the discovery that plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, that we figured out what makes bread rise. For much of that time, baking was an act of faith—faith that the dough would rise, provided you added a little of yesterday’s dough to today’s.

  The word yeast first appears in Middle English before the year 1000 and is derived, suitably enough, from the German word for foam (a vestige, no doubt, of Oktoberfests of yore). But no one really knew what yeast was, and certainly no one had a clue as to why it made beer and wine ferment and bread rise, let alone suspected it was a microorganism (naturally; the very concept of microorganisms hadn’t been discovered yet). To some, the action of yeast seemed downright mystical, even proof of the divine. The 1468 Brewers Book of Norwich refers to yeast as “goddisgoode” because it was made by the blessing of God.