Further Adventures in Baking Bread
Baking is calming. Soothing. Taking flour, water, yeast and salt and making something edible from just these basic elements. It can feel like some sort of alchemy is being practiced. Eating some bread that you have just made… it can sound overdramatic but it is a magical feeling.
Despite all of my efforts, I cannot claim to have had this feeling often. It is good to keep trying. A nice distraction from some of the other things in life.
Winter
I cannot claim to be a passionate baker. Far from it. It seems that winter brings the baker out in me. Well, the guy trying to be a baker. Especially wet winters. I don’t mind dry and cold but wet as well? No thank you. A nice warm kitchen with the oven on. Suits me very well.
Such an approach means I will never be systematic but that is fine. I have no plans to be a master baker. The approach is I wake up, look out of the window and, if it is raining and I am not working and have no other plans, I bake. Good to be active in a relatively static way that also allows me to do other things. The true amateur.
An Erratic Approach
In line with a casual approach my baking is not marked by some kind of remorseless efficiency. It is not an activity based on obsession, after all. A satisfying activity that I do indeed like to undertake alongside other activities. Mix the dough, then go in the garage and carry out a bit of indoor training. Short, hard work. Good for the ankles, especially my increasingly unreliable ankles. Then freshen up and back in to the kitchen, knock the dough back and shape it and then lunch whilst it had its second rise and the oven was preheated.
Once the oven was hot enough the bread went in to the oven. Then wait, relax. A passive activity accompanied by a favourite old film. ‘The Maltese Falcon’. Got my DVD player (!) working so it was time for a classic. Not the most scientific time-keeping, perhaps, waiting for the film to pass forty-five minutes before checking to see if the bread is ready but, like the whole process, strangely soothing. Still something new every time I watch that film…
Bready Looking Bread
Many have written far better words about the act of baking. The processes of kneading, leaving the the dough to rise, shaping the dough and then baking it to become bread would take many words to describe in detail. I am glad someone did, it made it much easier for me. I could do all that other stuff without thinking too much. Train, watch old films. Also clean the kitchen, tidy cycling cloths, clean bikes. Sleep, always a little sleep. Not even going to try to go in to detail about what I did.
At the end of it all, my bread looked pretty in a bread like sense. Actually it was the most bready looking bread I have ever made. The best thing is that it actually tasted like bread, a nice crust. It is not like I am suddenly a genius baker, just a nice outcome. Strange just how fulfilling it is. Following the instructions in a book to take a set of ingredients and create something. Reassuring, very soothing.
It will probably go completely wrong next time and this is not the best piece on baking ever written. But it is a nice distraction from so many other things. And, this time, it tasted pretty good.
