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Over the winter, my girlfriend and I have been doing a lot of cooking and eating. The reason is that it’s too cold to do much else. To date, we’ve made pasta, sushi, tacos, gnocchi and French onion soup. Then we decided to up the stakes.
I never understood bread before. I didn’t understand where it came from, what it was made of, or how people made it. I believed that making bread was an alchemical process that required not only the right ingredients, but the right chant and offering to the right god as well. Though I knew that bakers made bread in their bakery, in my heart I believed that it came to them ready-made from Demeter, the goddess of the harvest.
Last month, however, my girlfriend and I were in Berlin, staying with some friends, and we discovered that our friends make their own bread. Furthermore, the bread they make is nicer than the bread from a bakery. My girlfriend asked our guests about their bread and they promised to email us a recipe. When we returned to Wroclaw, I found an email in my inbox containing a link to a bread recipe. Apparently I was to make the bread. I asked my girlfriend about it and she said that men make bread, not women. I didn’t believe her so I went to Google and typed “men bake bread,” and got this result. Apparently it is true.
The recipe was complicated. I was not looking forward to it. It was this one. Undaunted, we made a list of ingredients (yeast and flour and a baking form) and drove to the store. I had never bought any kind of flour other than plain white, so I was surprised when I saw at least ten types of flour for sale. How would we choose the right flour? It wasn’t so difficult after all: we bought the flour that had a picture of a loaf of bread on the front. And on the side, to our joy, was an easy step by step guide to making bread, requiring fewer ingredients than the recipe given to us by our friends.
The next Sunday, we got up at around eleven and prepared to make bread for breakfast. We had forgotten that it takes a long time to make (hence the reason bakers get up so early) so we ended up having bread for lunch.
The first step is to dissolve the yeast in warm water. Our recipe was for a kilogram of bread, which we felt was too much for two people, so we halved every ingredient. That meant using exactly half the flour and luckily for us, exactly half the yeast. We should have measured everything, but my girlfriend will not let me buy a set of kitchen scales. She says I have bought too many kitchen items recently. I object. In the last few weeks I have only bought a set of knives, a blender, a vegetable chopper, an egg slicer, a potato peeler and an all-purpose vegetable slicer. I had to buy the knives because, as I personally demonstrated, you could drag the blades of the old knives forcefully along your palm and not cut yourself. I had to buy the blender to make smoothies. I don’t really eat much fruit, but when it’s in a smoothie, I eat lots of fruit. I had to buy the egg slicer because you cannot make egg sandwiches without one, although it broke on the second use and I haven’t replaced it yet. Perhaps I could have done without the egg slicer.
We dissolved the yeast in a litre of water, and poured half of the flour into a bowl. We then added the water to the bowl and I began to knead it into dough with my hands. Bread flour is very sticky. After some time, there was more dough stuck to my fingers than inside the bowl. When you don’t knead dough often, it’s hard to remember not to touch stuff. I ended up with dough on my jumper, my trousers, my arm where it was itchy, the side of my nose, as well as the kitchen surfaces, the cooker, the oven, the sink and my girlfriend. Finally the dough was ready. My girlfriend asked me if I had remembered the salt. I had not. We threw in some salt and re-kneaded the dough. Finally the dough was ready. Before placing the dough into the form, you need to cover the form with olive oil. Doing so stops the dough from sticking to the sides and allows you to remove the cooked bread from the form without having to hack it out with a knife. I picked up the form to cover it with olive oil and the olive oil that coated my fingers and ran down my arm told me that my girlfriend had already done it.
You have to let dough sit in a warm place for fifteen to thirty minutes to let it rise. Our apartment is not warm in winter. On average it is around 18ºC, which is wonderful for walking around town, but not when you’re sitting on the sofa. Our bread-making friends had an ingenious solution, however: turn on the oven to its lowest temperature and leave the door open. We did that and placed the dough inside the oven, as well as our hands, our arms and as much of our heads as was possible.
After thirty minutes we were happy and warm and the dough had doubled in size. The baking form was for a kilogram of dough, so our dough still didn’t take up much space in the form. Nevertheless, we fired the oven up to 220ºC and let the break cook. We set the timer for 45 minutes.
By this point we were very hungry. Personally, I was not holding out much hope for the outcome of the bread. I never expect complicated things to go right first time, especially this time, since we had not made an offering to Demeter before we began. I considered other things to eat, but could not think straight with the hunger, so instead I sat down and waited. My girlfriend sat and waited too. After 45 minutes the timer buzzed and we removed the bread from the oven. My girlfriend pushed a knife into the surface to check if it was done. If raw dough comes out with the knife, it is not done. No raw dough came out. We had succeeded!
Unfortunately, bread straight from the oven is far too hot to do anything with. We had to wait another thirty minutes before we could eat. When it was cool enough, we cut a small slice and tasted cautiously. As with the great pasta experiment, we were stunned at how well it had turned out. Not only had we made our own bread, but it was far tastier than the bread we had been buying from the stores.
We had sandwiches for the next four days, big thick slices with chunks of cheese and slices of tomato, with ploughman’s pickle and butter and cream cheese and anything else we found in the fridge.
We have been making bread constantly since then, and i’ll close this article by telling you some important things we have learnt:
1. Don’t forget the salt – it makes the bread tasteless.
2. Don’t try to bake the bread in a glass bowl – it needs a tin form to conduct the heat, and the dough will expand inside the bowl until it cracks apart and when the bread is ready, you will have to spend an hour picking out pieces of glass from it. When you eat the bread, you will always be wondering if you really did get every piece of glass out of it.
3. Don’t make a whole kilogram of bread in one go if there are only two of you. It’s way too much.
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