“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.” Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Baking bread is the most satisfying and the most time consuming of all my kitchen chores. I have a love/hate relationship with it. Love the results, the creative slashing and shaping, the smell of it baking, playing with the living dough, hate and resent the time involved, sometimes spanning weeks, as in liquid levains or nights as in pâte fermentée or a biga. The trouble stems from liking our bread cultivated by naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria or at the very least over-night matured commercial yeasts. In other words we like Old World Breads with rustic and artisan charm. The housewife of medieval England brewed her beer and her made bread together most days and then worked in the fields, washed linen against stones, wove on the loom, and died an early death fulfilling the many other chores, so why can’t I find time to make bread? Well, this week I have, but I know it will be a two or three-week phase and then it will be back to the supermarket.
Part of this is the downright mess, after a while I’m finding flour in the most remote areas of the kitchen. And then there are the cultures, each needing nurturing each day, Little Shop of Horrors style “Feed me, Fay, feed me” and of course, there’s the organisation, requiring knowing your plans days in advance, i.e. if you fancy a German farmhouse rye on Saturday you better start making the rye sourdough culture the preceding Sunday! Patience and organisation are not two of my virtues. But no bread ever tastes as good, smells as good, or keeps as well as your own, so you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Above is Italian Filone, a herb bread made with rosemary and winter savory from the garden, homemade rosemary and savory salt made last summer and herb infused olive oil, a wheat levain and a pâte fermentée. (see photo) This could just be the best bread known to humanity. Below are some Alsace sticks with spelt, after cooking you soak the spelt berries in Alsace wine overnight which can’t help making this loaf another all time winner.
