Bread Is Love

Wonderbread Is Apathy

With this recipe and the basic knowledge of bread baking, you can create a living thing, an eating/breathing/growing act of love for your family. Bread is the staff of life. Good bread is the pillar of family. There is no other smell like baking bread that you have kneaded, nurtured, loved.

Sugar feeds yeast. Yeast eats the sugar and belches out carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide makes the bread rise. Gluten in the flour stretches, the salt gives it flavor and keeps the yeast from growing out of control. It is balance in action and food.

My daughter bites into a piece sawn off a new loaf. Her eyes light up, her mouth curves into a smile, and without words, she gives her approval. "Bread" is one of the two dozen words she uses regularly, which seems fitting.

My beloved smiles at me whenever he sees me kneading. He feels taken care of, loved, and cherished.

I use a set of three bowls I bought from Marshall Pottery in Texas. They will be heirlooms when I die. They are heavy, beige ceramic with bands of deep cobalt. I cherish them; I bought them to make bread in. While they may hold other foods at time, that truly is their purpose in my life.

Why settle for bland, pasty Wonderbread that costs two or three dollars when you buy it in the store, when you can have something better, something that doesn’t roll into gray little pills between your palms, something that nourishes your heart because it was made by you, for you, for your family, for forty-five cents on average per simple, healthy loaf? Time isn’t an excuse – it takes me a half-hour of invested work to make a loaf of bread. I know – I’ve been timed while baking.

(The only bread I haven't tried yet is sourdough, largely because I have lost about six batches of starter. I'm going to try again once we are moved into the new place. Once you've mastered sourdough, though, you only need to buy flour and salt, and occasionally renew the starter. That seems like a damned good tradeoff to me.)

Once you master a basic loaf and understand how yeast works, you can bake challah, or anadama bread, or bagels. You can make your own pizza dough, top it with what you want: you can make pizzas out of soycheese and your own tomatoes. You can experiment, enjoying even the inevitable failures, because you are learning. You can revel in cutting off just another bland consumer item that has no soul in favor of a edible expression of love.

(If you want more bread recipes or instructions, feel free to email me.)

Rowan Crisp

June 2003