52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  “Of course not,” I improvised, thinking this was like having a pet. “I’m bringing it with us. Got to make the bread.”

  Even on vacation.

  WEEK

  22

  Kneadin’ in Skowhegan

  It is all mossy and moosey.

  —Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 1864

  Any event with the word conference in its name is an event to be avoided, as far as I’m concerned. Even if the preceding word is kneading. Even if it’s in Maine in August, when the blue berries are piling up faster than Bangor snow in January. This one in particular, the First Annual (that’s got to be an oxymoron, no?) Bread Kneading Conference, promised to be an avoid-at-all-costs Birkenstock-shod whole-grain brown-bread affair, with seminars called “Whole Wheat Pastry Workshop” (ever munch on a whole wheat croissant?—that would cure Katie of her passion for them) and “Build a Clay Oven with Kiko Denzer.”

  Wait a second—Kiko Denzer, the high priest of backyard bread-oven building, was going to be there? Denzer is the everyman’s Alan Scott. While Scott’s ovens, such as the one I’d baked in at Bobolink’s bakery, cost thousands of dollars and weigh tens of thousands of pounds, Denzer’s message is that you can build a perfectly good wood-fired oven in a weekend from earth, sand, and water found, if not in your backyard, then not far from it.

  Ever since baking in Bobolink’s brick oven, I’d had a growing urge to make bread in a wood-fired oven again, so, pushing my conference misgivings aside, I told Anne, “Pack your pie tins and flatten your a’s, honey—we’re going to Maine!”

  ——————————————

  As Anne made blueberry pies back at the cottage, I pulled into the parking lot behind the Federated Church in Skowhegan to find my worst fears about the conference seemingly confirmed. The very first, and I mean the absolute very first, person I saw was a gangly hillbilly type who looked to be sixty-five, wearing a beard that looked to be seventy-five, over a linen shirt and jeans held up by suspenders. But the attendees, about seventy in all, turned out to be much more diverse than I’d expected. True, I saw more pigtails and ponytails than I’d seen since third grade, and it was oddly reassuring to see that kerchiefs haven’t gone out of style, but the group was a mix of young and old, professional and amateur, rural and urban. There were small farmers and potters, professional bakers and home bakers, dabblers, retirees, and babies. Not to mention a statistically improbable proportion of writers.

  When I heard one gentleman saying he only bakes “authentic French artisan bread,” I inquired where his bakery was.

  “I’m not a baker, I’m a writer,” he snapped, insulted at the insinuation that he might be a mere baker. I should’ve known from his pressed khakis and long-sleeved checked shirt on this ninety-degree day, but caught off-guard, I did a really dumb thing.

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “So am I.”

  A pair of close-set eyes over a sharp nose gave him the look of an aggrieved eagle. He glared at me, I stared back, and we stood there for a moment like a couple of bandits who’d arrived simultaneously to knock off the same bank. Two writers at an obscure gathering of seventy people?

  This other writer, whom I’ll refer to only as “this other writer,” was clearly not happy with my presence. He expressed his displeasure by saying one thing semipolitely, while above his head hovered a word balloon, clear as could be, with the words he was really thinking. The effect was dizzying.

  “What brings you here? [How dare you cover the same event I’m covering! I’m a much more important writer than you!]”

  “I’m trying to bake the perfect loaf of peasant bread.”

  “What do you mean by ‘peasant bread’? You mean, a pain de campagne? [You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?]”

  I explained, realizing how stupid it sounded when I verbalized my quest aloud, that I was trying to perfect just one type of bread. Although it did sound slightly better in French; pain de campagne means, literally, “country bread.”

  “Do you know the origin of peasant bread? [My right pinky knows more about bread than you’ll ever know, punk.]”

  I admitted I didn’t.

  “World War Two. [Bet you thought it was a lot older, didn’t you?]”

  I mentioned that I was hoping to bake bread in a very old place, perhaps a monastery somewhere. That seemed to pique his interest.

  “Do you know Paris? [You wouldn’t know Paris, of course, because unlike me, you don’t have a flat there.]”

  “Not really.”

  He drew close. “There’s a monastery off the rue de Rivoli,” he whispered, as if letting me in on a secret. “Take the Métro to Rivoli, then go behind l’Église Saint-Paul, down the steps toward the Seine.”

  His eagle eyes darted around nervously, either to make sure no one was listening or to watch for an unsuspecting mouse.

  “You’ll find a street vendor who sells wares made in the monastery. It’s the most odd church. Catholic, yet they pray holding icons.* You may find bread there.”

  I furiously scribbled down notes, feeling as if I’d stepped onto the set of The Da Vinci Code. This time I couldn’t read the balloon above his head. Was this guy giving me a valuable lead or putting me on?

  Regardless, it was about the tenth time that day that the words “France” or “Paris” had been uttered, usually in response to the question, “Where’d you learn to bake?” or “What got you interested in bread?” Everyone but me seemed to be going to France to taste the bread or learn to make the bread.

  The raptor and I avoided each other the rest of the day, and I focused on why I had come—to learn to build an earth oven. On the way through the parking lot, I’d wondered if the suspender-clad man with the ZZ Top beard was Kiko Denzer, for he’d fit my image of the evangelist of earth ovens, this creature who looked as if he’d risen (and not all that completely, to be honest) from the earth itself. So when I met Denzer, I was almost a little disappointed. He was a youngish-looking forty-eight, clean shaven, with curly blond hair peeking out from under a straw hat, his only other concession to my notion of him being his sandals, which, it turned out, he wore for practical reasons.

  “Everyone, take off your shoes,” were his opening words to his class. “We’re going to mix some mud.”

  You never saw so many pairs of shoes come off so quickly. This was a crowd that didn’t need to be encouraged to get barefoot, and in a moment, eighteen pairs of shoes littered the grass. Except there were nineteen of us.

  “Your shoes are still on,” Kiko said to me, smiling.

  I winced. The idea of sticking my clean feet into a mound of dirty clay along with thirty-six other feet was about as appealing as the Egyptian custom of kneading dough by foot. “Uh, I’m going to be visiting some other seminars this morning, and that clay looks pretty messy.”

  Kiko was clearly disappointed with me but didn’t press it. I watched, took notes, and, with the clay oven steadily taking shape, occasionally wandered off to hear other talks. In the afternoon, I sat in on a lecture on raising grain, which I thought might be useful, as my own wheat was ripening back home. The speaker was the parking-lot longbeard. I strained to hear his unamplified words in the church community room, my mind drifting off, and I reflected on the fact that this bread conference was being held in and outside a church hall. It seemed fitting, as the event felt like a church community supper, full of optimism and the conviction that somehow we were saving the world from its path of white bread and factory farming. Throughout the day, I’d heard people wax optimistic about the rise in the state’s organic farming acreage; the recovery of wheat, once widely grown in Maine but now a niche crop; the dramatic comeback of small farming; and the growing demand for whole-grain, locally milled products.

  Needing air, I went back outside to see what else was going on. Somehow a white-flour baker had slipped into this whole-grain program. This guy knew his craft. In fact, all of the bakers working here knew their craft, all baking
in portable, unfamiliar wood-fired ovens that had been brought in on trailers, working, not in their climate-controlled kitchens, but outdoors in the ninety-degree heat, and producing beautiful breads. The white-flour baker was taking questions as his session wound down. I couldn’t resist.

  “How do you get those much-desired, irregular air holes in bread?”

  He misunderstood my question and started to tell me how to eliminate air holes. Jeez. How could anyone have that problem?

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. I have the opposite problem. My bread is like a kitchen sponge. I’m trying to get some air holes into it.”

  “You’re probably overkneading or not using enough water. How long are you kneading at second speed?”

  “Twelve minutes in my KitchenAid,” I said. “Less if I autolyse,” I added so he wouldn’t think I was a dumb novice. He let his mouth drop open.

  “Twelve minutes?! In a KitchenAid?” Everybody turned around in their seats to look at the dumb novice.

  “A KitchenAid beats the hell out of the dough,” he lectured, “unless you have a new model with the different dough hook, but even then, three minutes is plenty. If you autolyse, you probably need only a minute. Every turn of that dough hook whips oxygen into the dough.”

  A minute? Hardly seemed worthwhile to drag the thing out. In fact, I didn’t know it then, but I had used my KitchenAid for the last time.

  WEEK

  23

  Powerless

  Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.

  —Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head, 1983

  Somehow my KitchenAid mixer hadn’t made it into our overflowing baggage of fishing gear, kayaks, bicycles, board games, and books. Any more stuff, and we would’ve needed to bring along some Sherpas. My levain, naturally, did make the trip to Maine, and with company expected tonight for dinner in our rented cottage, I was ready to make some bread. Even if it meant—ugh!—kneading by hand. The last time I’d done this, it had taken a good twenty minutes and my arms and back had ached afterward. As they were already aching from the previous day’s kayaking with Zach, I wasn’t looking forward to the chore. How could I make this easier?

  The baker who’d ridiculed me at the Kneading Conference had said that only a minute of kneading with the stand mixer was sufficient if preceded by an autolyse. It stood to reason that autolyse should reduce the hand-kneading time as well, so after mixing all the ingredients, I gave the dough a twenty-five-minute rest before kneading. Any longer than that, and I feared the dough would start to rise before I’d even started kneading.*

  The difference was astounding. The dough, which started out feeling gritty and sticky, became smooth and elastic with just the first couple of turns. I had tried autolyse once before, with no discernable change, so what was different? First, I was using, on Charlie van Over’s advice, a much wetter (68 percent hydration) dough; second, about a third of it came from the levain, which already had well-developed gluten; and third—and most importantly—I was kneading by hand, not with a machine.

  The function of kneading, of course, is to develop the gluten in the dough. Among the largest protein molecules found in nature, gluten consists of long, tangled chains lying about in a haphazard arrangement. Kneading stretches the coils out, aligning them side by side so that they can bond with one another, forming the strong elastic network that enables the dough to stretch and capture the carbon dioxide gases emitted by the yeast.

  I discovered that I actually liked kneading by hand, feeling the dough transform under my hands from a gooey, thick batter into smooth dough with each push, turn, and fold. A quick and enjoyable seven minutes later, my dough felt ready, elastic and supple. And there was no equipment—no machinery—to clean up.

  Two weeks on the Maine coast sent me home with a bellyful of lobster and a determination to redouble my efforts. My peasant bread, a yeasty pain de campagne, made with a wild yeast levain, was vastly improved over the bread of twenty-two weeks ago. The texture and gas holes I so desperately desired seemed as elusive as ever, but I wasn’t ready to give up. Before summer was over, I’d be harvesting and grinding my own wheat and baking in an earth oven. Give up? I was just getting warmed up.

  IV.

  Sext

  Sext takes place at midday when the sun is at its apex and one has become a bit weary and mindfulness is all but impossible.

  WEEK

  24

  White-Bread Diet

  A dog fed on fine white bread flour and water does not live beyond the 50th day. A dog fed on the coarse bread of the military lives and keeps his health.

  —François Magendie, writing in the Lancet, 1826

  Weight: 205 pounds

  Bread bookshelf weight: 33 pounds

  Anne looked uncommonly grim as she appeared for breakfast in the kitchen, where I was munching on a slice of pain de campagne toast.

  “How many weeks are left ?” She didn’t have to specify how many weeks of what.

  “I don’t know. A lot. Why?

  “I’m getting fat.”

  “You’re blaming the bread? I don’t think so. Look at me.”

  “Have you weighed yourself lately?”

  “Ninety-three kilograms.”

  “Two hundred and five pounds? You’re getting fat.”

  I’d forgotten that as a doctor (and a former resident of Canada), she knew the metric system.

  It was true that we’d been eating a lot of bread lately, having toast for breakfast and slathering butter over peasant bread at dinner, and when I wasn’t making my own, I was coming home with armfuls of bakery bread to compare with mine. The Atkins diet this wasn’t. Yet my bread felt so . . . healthy. Made from my own hand, eaten fresh, with a little whole wheat and rye, and now wild yeast—it looked and tasted wholesome.

  Still, it was essentially white bread, that little bit of added whole wheat and rye notwithstanding. Let’s be honest, I was on a white-bread diet. I couldn’t even bring myself to say it out loud, these code words for bland, nonnutritious, boring. It’s easy to confuse white bread with Wonder bread and view it as a twentieth-century corporate evil. However, while whipping chemicals and air into bread and wrapping it, presliced, in cellophane may be a recent innovation, as long as there has been flour, millers have been sifting out the coarse bran to make white flour, which has long been a symbol of purity and refinement. In fact, the English word flour comes from the French fleur de farine, literally, the “flower of the flour,” or the best of the flour, meaning the refined flour left after the bran is sifted off. In ancient Rome and Greece, white bread was prized, though even the “bread and circuses” Romans knew that whole wheat bread was healthier. Which is why their wrestlers were forbidden to eat white bread while training for their circuses.

  Yet the fact remains that bread made from sifted flour has sustained a good portion of mankind for thousands of years. So what happened? When did a food that was basically healthy come to stand for blandness and nutritional emptiness? And was that reputation justified?

  Certainly it was in 1937, nearly a decade after Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s death, when the vitamin that could prevent pellagra, Goldberger’s elusive PP factor, was finally isolated by an agricultural scientist at the University of Wisconsin. Oddly enough, this compound was extracted from a plant that was almost as common in the South as cotton, a crop that also grew up to the front steps of the shacks, with a leaf that on a windy day gave the air the heady smell of an old pipe: tobacco.

  The cure for pellagra was right under their noses. Although chewing or smoking tobacco did not supply the essential vitamin, the nicotine in tobacco leaves could easily be oxidized to make what was named nicotinic acid, the preventative and cure for pellagra. Recognized as an essential nutrient, nicotinic acid was added to the vitamin B family of water-soluble vitamins—that is, vitamins that are not stored in body fat and so must be consumed regularly—as vitamin B3.

  Finally, a pellagra preventa
tive was available as an inexpensive vitamin that could be synthesized in the laboratory. Thiamine, another vitamin in which Americans were deficient, had just been synthesized the previous year. But how to get these critical vitamins and others into the American diet? Well, what was the one food that everyone ate? Spurred by concern about public health and the readiness of the nation’s boys to go to war, action was taken, not by the government, but by millers and bakers who voluntarily started adding vitamin supplements to their flour and bread in 1938. Two years later, an American Medical Association panel recommended restoring riboflavin, thiamine, iron, and nicotinic acid to white flour to the levels in which they are naturally present in whole wheat flour. In the case of nicotinic acid, this would turn out to be sufficient to prevent pellagra. The word the AMA came up with for restoring nutrients lost in processing (After rejecting restorative) was enriched.*

  By 1942, without a single piece of federal legislation having been passed, millers and bakers had embraced the enrichment movement so thoroughly that over 75 percent of all flour and bread products sold in the United States were enriched. A year later, the War Food Administration required that all flour and bread sold to the government be enriched for the duration of the war, and that took care of the remaining 25 percent. Pellagra was all but wiped out. You won’t see the words nicotinic acid on the side of your bag of flour, however. Bakers, uneasy with a name that evoked tobacco, successfully lobbied for a new term, which we still use today: niacin.

  Following the war, the federal government, seeing the success of the program, naturally ended it, and enrichment was returned to voluntary status. The millers and bakers wisely ignored the government, and it became a de facto requirement: American flour would forever after be enriched. Even today the Food and Drug Administration only specifies what constitutes “enriched” flour (adding folic acid in 1996); it does not mandate its use.