The Delight of Bread

The dough starts out as a tacky mass of flour, water, sugar, yeast, and salt. I shove my fist into it and pull the dough out, stretching it and pressing it into shape as it leaves sticky residue on the table. Under my hands it slowly forms into a soft pillow ready for the first rise. I plop the future loaf into a bowl and wait. Two hours later the dough has risen into a gentle slope of gluten and air. My merciless fist deflates it again, and I roll it and shape it into something resembling your classic bread loaf. Another thirty minutes and it’s ready to turn into a crispy golden loaf. The art of bread making has sadly faded in most homes around the United States. Perhaps we’ve lost something, by swapping out the delectable homey aroma of fresh bread for the overripe sweetness of a factory-made loaf. But more than flavor and smell, a fine loaf of bread is a work of art bringing delight to both the maker and the consumer. Creating a lovely, tasty loaf reminds me to slow down and create for the sake of creating.

            Baking bread, unlike scrolling on Instagram, leaves me with a sense of productivity. I offer three hours of my time to mix, knead, wait, shape, and bake, resulting in a fresh, warm loaf of yeasty goodness that I can share with friends and family. The time spent on production only increases the enjoyment of the reward. Baking bread reminds me that much of the joy in life lies in the wait. And much of my bread-making journey has revolved around the wait. I started baking bread when I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, after receiving Paul Hollywood’s Bread, probably the best book for beginners on the art of a good loaf. At first I was greatly intimidated. Everyone had told me that bread was the bane of amateur bakers. Nobody made their own bread anymore. Bread was a mushy mass held together by a flavorless crust you bought in a plastic bag at the grocery store. Fresh bread was something of a long-forgotten past, of Little House on the Prairie and my Pennsylvania German farming ancestors. Paul Hollywood was a professional baker, and I was just a kid who liked making boxed cakes. However, I figured the worst that would happen was that my parents would be short four cups of flours and a sprinkling of yeast, so I decided to try the experiment.

            After reading and rereading the instructions for a basic loaf of bread, I tried my hand at it. The first result was not bad. The bread was soft with a crackly crust and had the delightful yeasty flavor of freshness. Never mind that the loaf looked like a blob of dough had fallen off the ceiling onto to the tray. It tasted good, and that was all that mattered, right? Nevertheless, I decided to keep going. Someday my loaves would look like Paul Hollywood’s: tidy and professional and inviting. I made ciabatta and baguettes and sourdough. I tried my hand at naan and pita and even flour tortillas, if a tortilla counts as bread. My baguettes looked like twisted snakes and my pitas were the shape of the imperfect circles you draw when you first become an artist. It turned out Paul Hollywood had been making bread for a lot longer than I had, and therefore was considerably better at making his creations look like bread. At some point in the process I gave up and concluded that it was as it would remain: my bread would never look like anything besides weirdly-shaped amoebas.

However, it turns out the principle of practice-makes-perfect applies to bread as well as other crafts. I’ve been making bread for around seven years now, and I can say my loaves have turned out considerably better than when I first started. I’ve purchased a few other bread books, testing out the recipes and baking for the love of the art and for the joy of offering a fresh loaf to my family. I’ve developed new techniques from the books I’ve read that enable me to shape the loaves into more conventional designs. I’ve even gotten to experiment with braiding loaves, a process as delightful as it is beautiful. Bread-making involves patience. A great deal of patience. Patience as you wait for the loaf to rise, hoping you didn’t kill the yeast by adding salt right on top of it. Patience as you wait for it to bake in the oven, the tantalizing aroma tempting you to eat it before it’s ready. And patience as you knead and shape at least once every two weeks for seven years until one day you look at your loaf and realize it finally looks like bread and not a blob.

Perhaps bread-making delights me so much because I don’t receive instant gratification. I can’t get the rush of entertainment from watching an Instagram reel or a short YouTube clip. Instead I have to actually work and wait through the long process of producing a tasty loaf. Even with my ugliest loaves, there’s a little bit of pride mixed in because I spent three hours to make bread so we could all enjoy it. Perhaps our fast-paced American culture has forgotten the pride of having produced something with our own hands to share with others, the process of developing a skill over a long time just for the sake of creating.