52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  4. After a day of lugging all this debris to the foundation, make half a dozen trips to your local home center to buy bags of stone, because all that damned urbanite you scavenged filled only a third of your enormous hole, and the small stones you pour in just vanish at an impossible rate.

  5. Crawl out of bed the next day and start to build a base for the oven so you won’t have to bake lying on your stomach.

  6. Instead of buying those easy-to-assemble interlocking bricks used for building retaining walls, insist (for aesthetic reasons) on using old-fashioned red brick for the base. Construct a four-foot cylinder of said brick, three feet high, taking pains to keep the structure level on your sloping site. Don’t bother using mortar, for mortar is messy and time-consuming, and besides, it seems to me that there will be no place for the brick to go once the cylinder is filled with yet more fill (see steps 3–4) and the thing is topped with a heavy oven (see steps . . . uh, well, we won’t be getting that far this weekend. Or next).

  7. As the brick wall rises, continue filling with more debris. And more. After several hours of stripping your yard of anything that isn’t moving, you may be tempted to loosen your definition of “debris” somewhat, but resist the urge to go after low-hanging fruit, such as loose stones from an existing wall, the foundation of your home, or the neighbor’s cat. Trust me on this, especially if your wife has a sharp eye.

  8. When the last layer of brick is in place, top off with small stones to fill in the gaps between the larger pieces of fill. Smooth with hands, then step back to watch, with horror, as the entire structure collapses, the fill pouring out like flour from a broken sack.

  9. Open a beer. Rebuild next weekend, using mortar.

  WEEK

  37

  Indian Giver

  Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

  —Robert Orben, humorist and head speechwriter to President Gerald Ford

  “You’re in an unusually good mood today,” Anne noted as, whistling, I prepared to load a pain au levain into the oven.

  “Parchment paper,” I explained. “I can’t understand why no one ever told me about this. It’s like finding religion.”

  No more worries about the dough sticking to the peel, no more cornmeal or flour burning on the oven floor. Just cover the peel with a piece of parchment paper, and slide the whole thing, paper and all, into the oven. What a relief! Bread, however, was taking a backseat to another project I had going today. I was making flour. With an Indian artifact grindstone that Mike Dooley had lent me as I left his mill.

  “How do you know this is a grindstone?” I’d asked, skeptical. To me, it looked like a rock.

  “Notice how symmetrical it is.” Mike traced a path along its perimeter with his hand. “See how it’s smooth on the flat side, and rough on the rounded side. And these little pockmarks are from the tools used to shape the stone. Nature doesn’t do that.”

  But Native Americans do. Or, once upon a time, did. I asked how old it was.

  “No way to tell. Could be a hundred and fifty, could be five thousand. I know for a fact that some of the arrowheads in the settlement where I found this in eastern Kansas were thousands of years old. You can date them from the style. Why don’t you grind some of your wheat with this,” he said, placing the stone in my hands.

  Grind my wheat with a rock? Who did I look like, Pocahontas? But I hadn’t yet come up with an alternate way to grind it, having somehow neglected to address that tiny detail, and the notion of using the artifact was intriguing, so I accepted the rock.

  The grindstone, 3½ inches wide by 6½ inches long and 3 inches high, weighed just over four pounds—a little less than a bag of flour—and felt good to hold. I marveled that it had been shaped by stone tools. But this was just half of the mill. If I was going to use it, I needed a companion piece on which to rub this one, with the grain in between. A slightly concave stone lifted from a freestanding wall on our property fit the bill. Hmm. I did say (“A Recipe for Disaster,” step 7) I’d resist low-hanging fruit when scavenging, but the rock was too perfect. I resolved to replace it when I was done.*

  Out on the picnic table, I poured a handful of wheat into the hollow of the stone and, with both hands, ran the Indian artifact grindstone over it. The stone simply rolled over the kernels of wheat as if they were marbles. I applied some more pressure. Same result. Then I really put my back into it, rubbing vigorously back and forth, squeezing my eyes shut for an extra “umph!”

  I opened them to a miracle. The stone was covered in white dust. I had made flour! The suddenness of it took me off guard, for I’d expected that the first grinding would crush the wheat into smaller pieces, and I would grind those further, and so on—After all, I was doing this by hand—and eventually I would get something resembling coarse flour, but the rock was already covered in fine flour, looking not much different from what comes out of the five-pound bag from the supermarket.

  I was a miller.

  Atop the flour sat a rubble of broken kernels and flakes of bran. Encouraged, I rubbed some more, and some more, as grain flew all over the place. Occasionally brushing the flour and bran into a bowl, then tossing another handful of wheat on the stone, I continued grinding, playing with the motion, moving from a back-and-forth action to a tight circular one, humming a mock Indian song—that is, I’m sorry to say, the Atlanta Braves war chant.

  Two hours later, a small mound of flour forming in the bottom of my bowl, Anne came outside to check on the progress of her white man and was impressed. “Flour! But how are you going to grind the bran flakes?”

  “I’m not. You’re going to sieve them out, Minnehaha. We’re making white flour.”

  This was the greatest surprise of the entire endeavor. I’d expected that I could only get whole wheat flour from hand grinding, but I’d learned more about wheat in the past two hours than in eight months of reading and research. It was one thing having Mike explain what was happening inside Bay State’s steel-roller mills; I had discovered firsthand what makes wheat so uniquely suitable for milling. The three parts of wheat—endosperm, bran, and germ—react very differently to the pressure of the stone. The starchy endosperm, the white part of the kernel, literally shatters into powder (aka flour), while the tough bran breaks off fairly cleanly into large flakes that can be sieved. The tiny wheat germ, the embryo of the seed, is malleable owing to its high oil content and thus gets flattened. The different mechanical properties of each part of the seed are what make milling and separation possible, and I realized we could take advantage of them ourselves to make white (or whitish) flour from our garden-grown, Indian-stone-ground wheat.

  Traditionally, stone millers silk-screened the ground wheat—like printing a T-shirt, but forcing wheat instead of ink through the fabric—in a process called bolting, but Anne and I used an old window screen in an aluminum frame. While I continued to grind, Anne rubbed the flour back and forth with our metal bench scraper. What fell through was unmistakably white flour, with small flecks of bran and germ.

  “Can I put this on yogurt?” Anne asked, looking at the bran that remained on the screen. I expressed some doubts about the culinary properties of raw wheat bran, but we saved it, anyway. Plus, I wanted to use it to decorate the tops of the loaves I was going to make with my flour.

  The net result of our long day was a mere eight ounces of flour and a quart container of bran. On the one hand, it was heady and exciting to be milling with this ancient grindstone that had passed through the hands of countless Indians (I no longer had to be convinced of its authenticity), and the prospect of baking with my own stone-ground wheat was almost thrilling. On the other hand, we’d hardly made a dent in the bucket of grain. I’d have to find another way to grind the rest.

  Shortly after, an e-mail from Mike threatened to make that issue moot. I’d given him a sample of my wheat berries for analysis, and he was surprised by the results. “This wheat appears to be soft red winter. Would that be right? If s
o, it may not want to bake a good loaf of bread.”

  It may not want to bake—what?! I called him. “Are you sure?” The protein level had come in at barely 9 percent, far below the 11 to 12 percent level of even all-purpose flour, let alone bread flour, which is nearly 13 percent. My flour was apparently more suitable for making, say, croissants than pain de campagne.

  The protein level, of course, is a measure of the gluten critical to bread making. Soft wheat, whether winter or spring, is far lower in protein and is used in pastries, piecrusts, and cookies, where bread or even all-purpose flour would be too tough. What is sold as “cake flour” is from the softest wheat, with a protein level of only 5 to 8 percent.*

  “We overnighted some to our Minneapolis lab to double-check our own laboratory findings. It sure looks like soft red,” Mike said.

  No wonder it’d been so easy to grind.

  Anne saw me scowling and asked what was wrong.

  “White man tell me I grow wheat for many moons,” I said, “to make flour only good for cupcakes.”

  WEEK

  38

  Terror Firma Redux

  I have hope because what’s the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

  —Studs Terkel

  “I’m going to have to build the oven base over again, with mortar,” I moaned to Anne.

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “The project is escalating. Now we’re into a permanent structure.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I had that coming. Having waited way too long to start this thing (thinking I needed only a weekend—gee, where’d I get that silly idea?), I’d have to finish it up myself. Zach, who’d shared much of the hard labor on our first attempt, was preparing to return to college and unable to do more than periodically stop by and check on my painfully slow progress with the brick and mortar. I despise masonry work—the mixing, the dust, the mess, the cleanup, and the weight, my God, the weight! Mortar must be among the densest stuff on earth. The base rose slowly because I was building not just a wall but a circle of nineteen bricks. This meant that the nineteenth brick (or part thereof, since I also had to split bricks) needed to meet back at the first brick, at the same height. There was no room for sloppiness or eyeballing. Every brick had to be set with a bubble level, and carefully. Not to mention the fact that I was building this circle with rectangular bricks, angling them to form a circle. Getting mortar into the pie-slice-shaped wedges between the bricks was a real chore.

  The only thing I did do well was mix mortar. It was just like making dough. As with dough, I found it easier to start a little wet and add dry mortar to get the right consistency, rather than to start dry and add water. As I replaced my fragile wall with sturdy brick and mortar, I couldn’t help feeling like one of the Three Little Pigs, especially when I looked at the building materials that were scattered around: straw, sticks, clay, and brick. Surely this was one oven that the Big Bad Wolf wouldn’t blow down (though the Big Bad Building Inspector might, now that I had a “permanent structure”). By six o’clock, ten hours after starting, the base was finished (and so was I). Kiko’s “build an oven in a weekend” was proving a tad optimistic, to put it mildly. Two weekends of work, and I hadn’t even started on the actual oven yet.

  After cleaning up my tools, I staggered inside, feeling an old hernia for the first time in years, swigged down a prescription painkiller/anti-inflammatory with a cold beer (because the label warned “take with food”), and was looking forward to slipping into a hot-enough-to-peel-your-skin-off bath when I heard Katie talking to Anne in the next room.

  “Dad doesn’t look so good.”

  I couldn’t make out Anne’s response except for the word “bread.”

  Bread? What day was this? Sunday, and I hadn’t made bread this week! I’d promised myself I’d bake every week for a year without fail, and this wasn’t how I wanted my streak to end: in a hot bathtub with a cold beer. I considered my options. Time was short; energy shorter. There was only one thing to do. I hadn’t used it in years, but it was still in the pantry, taking up lots of space while collecting dust, like, I suspect, three-quarters of the other ones in America. Really, when was the last time you used your bread machine?

  ——————————————

  The oddest thing about the bread machine is that it was invented in Japan, where rice, not wheat, is the primary dietary starch. But that’s the Japanese for you, automating the production of a food they hardly eat. The machine arrived in the United States in 1987, and within ten years bread-machine sales had grown to $400 million annually. Anne and I contributed about $175 to that total when, like many Americans, we found the temptation of daily, warm, home-baked bread too seductive to resist. Also like many Americans, we hadn’t used our machine in years.

  Certainly, baking bread in the machine was easy. I measured out and added all the ingredients, after which it was basically (apologies to Ron Popeil) set it and forget it. Tonight’s loaf would be ready in a couple of hours, versus the eight that my usual peasant bread took. The dough, aided by gentle heat and a heavy dose of yeast, rose more, but the crust, because it was not exposed to intense oven heat and dryness, was soft and flavorless, as with commercial bread. Cooked in an enclosed plastic box, the loaf was more steamed than baked. And without a poolish or a levain, its taste was bland and uninteresting. The bread machine seemed to have been designed to reproduce not artisan bread but commercial bread, the cellophane-wrapped kind. With one big difference: commercial loaves don’t have a whopping hole in the center of the loaf, left by the kneading paddle. My model produced a huge gap that protruded into half the slices, making it difficult to get enough bread for even a few grilled cheese sandwiches.

  Well, I said I wanted holes in my bread; I got them.

  The machine did have one thing going for it. I was free to soak in the bathtub for an hour while it made the bread, all by itself. As I lay submerged, with the lights out and shades drawn, reflecting on the day, the week, and the months, my reptilian brain, as Clotaire Rapaille calls it, took over. And it said, Billy, what on earth are you doing? Killing yourself spending hours scavenging for “urbanite,” mining clay, threshing wheat, grinding flour like it’s 1491. By the way, how’s the bread coming, fella? What’s that? It’s downstairs steaming in a machine?

  I ran some more hot water into the tub as the last light of summer faded from the sky. I had to get back on track and seize control of my life—and my bread. My mind drifted back to a thought I’d had the week I’d taken a Zen approach to bread: The perfect loaf was already there, waiting to be discovered. I had to elevate myself to reach it. I had to get myself out of the ditch I was digging, figuratively and literally, and focus on the baker, not the bread.

  I decided right then and there where to start. The next day, Zach went back to college, and I moved into his bedroom.

  WEEK

  39

  A Lot of ‘Splainin’ to Do

  The ingredients for bread were always the same: flour, yeast, water, and salt. But the difficulty was that there were ten thousand ways of combining these simple elements.

  — Julia Child, My Life in France, 2006

  “I think I’m sleeping in Zach’s room tonight,” I said with feigned nonchalance, carrying my bathrobe and pillows out of our bedroom.

  I waited till I was just out of sight before adding, “And maybe tomorrow night as well. Maybe for a while.”

  There. It was out.

  Anne wordlessly followed me into Zach’s room, then shadowed me back into what used to be our room as I returned to get some things. I decided it’d be best if I didn’t transfer too many of my possessions just yet. Anne’s shadowboxing, meanwhile, required a response.

  “It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.

  “Julia?”

  As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”

  Let’s start with
Julia.

  I’m referring, of course, to the late Julia Child.

  I had been reading her memoir and had learned that Julia and her husband went through an astounding 284 pounds of flour in order to perfect the baguette recipe for volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Like me, she’d struggled with the crust. Like me, she’d tried all kinds of ways to create steam in the oven before finally finding a solution: dropping a hot metal ax head into a pan of cold water! (You can just picture Julia, wearing a welder’s helmet and asbestos gloves, holding a pair of tongs with a red-hot, glowing ax head at the other end.) Also like me, she had eventually discovered slow, cool fermentations, autolyse, and even Raymond Calvel. In fact, she’d returned to France to meet the professor when she’d reached a dead end in her baking. After a single afternoon in which Calvel revolutionized her approach to bread, Julia returned home “euphoric” and redoubled her efforts to bake the perfect baguette.

  Why? In her own words, because “I was simply fascinated by bread and determined to learn how to bake it for myself. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.” I’d found a soul mate. I’ve always adored Julia Child—at least her television persona, which is all I know—and now I felt as if I had a companion on my journey. With the benevolent spirits of Beard and Child smiling down on me, how could I fail? I resolved to soldier on.

  Soldiers need sleep, however, which is why I had my pillows tucked under my arm. Julia had also given me the courage to do something I’d been thinking about for some time: moving into a room of my own. I’m a finicky and featherlight sleeper, and an early riser. Anne, meanwhile, was often writing up her patient charts late into the night and coming to bed after I was asleep, and no matter how quietly she tiptoed, I’d wake up. On the other hand, how Anne slept in the same room as me was a mystery, as age had brought a third companion into our bedroom, my increasingly heavy snoring.