Making Bread

There's truly nothing like fresh bread straight out of the oven. It's something I've enjoyed since I was a kid, munching on rolls as they emerged from the ovens at my parents' restaurant. I remember sometimes being halfway through eating a still-warm roll when a new batch would come out of the oven, the whoosh of the oven as the doors opened promising that these would taste even fresher, more golden and tender. I have fond memories of my father at the huge bread mixer pouring flour from giant sacks, rolling out the dough, sweeping up the flour, and then doing it all again every week for what seemed like my whole childhood. Sometimes a cloud of flour would form around the rim of that mixer, eventually settling like snow on the cold tile floor, allowing my sister and me to make footprints or draw a smiley face. It was a fun place to be a kid.

When I visit my friends E and M here in town, more often than not they invite me to share a meal with them. And, frequently, the meal is accompanied by M's homemade bread. She makes bread a few times a week, even during the summertime when the oven can heat up much of their modest home. M is a wonderful cook and baker, and I like to watch and help her work whenever I can. So, one day a week or two ago I asked her to show me how to make bread, and she agreed.

M has her bread recipe down. It's been committed to memory, and she works without assistance of measuring cups or spoons. I suppose anyone who makes a recipe often enough can commit it to memory- but how many of us do? (The best I can do is tell you the proportions of sugar and brown sugar in Nestle Tollhouse cookies- 3/4 cup each- which gives you some insight into my baking repertoire.) But M didn't just commit a recipe to memory for convenience, she learned from her mother, who no doubt learned from her mother, and so forth. Truly a ritual, of a sort that we lack in America, save for, perhaps, Thanksgiving Day.

Once she'd assembled all the ingredients, M and I sat on the floor and got to work. We began with a large plastic bowl full of flour, into which M dug a small moat and placed a cube of yeast. Then she poured warm water over it, and mixed it up. But now... um.. well, I'm forgetting what else went into it. There was definitely salt and oil at some point. The mixture was at first pasty and watery, then later turned doughy, with me stirring and M adjusting the proportions along the way. Then we kneaded, and I soon fell behind M in stamina. I tried to keep up with her steady pace, but she had years of experience and conditioning on me. Eventually we'd kneaded it enough, she said, and it was ready to proof (rise).

All of this was interesting, but it tested my natural attention span in the kitchen. When the bread was ready to sit and proof for the first time, I was ready to clean up and move on to the next thing. M covered the dough with a towel and set it in the sun on their porch. Once it had risen, we took it inside, kneaded it once more, and then left it to proof again. All told, prep to baking time, was probably two hours. M and I spent the time chatting and watching her grandson and some neighborhood children, and the time passed quickly enough.

To prepare the bread for baking, we pulled baseball-size portions of dough and kneaded it slightly, then placed it into a baking pan in the pattern of a petaled flower- one ball in the center with the other balls of dough ringing that circle. In this pattern, the dough grows together but can be easily broken off at the natural boundaries of each portion and sliced as needed. So we popped the bread into the oven, cleaned up fairly quickly, and-- that was that, at least until I got my hands on a nice warm piece of bread. Like my parents and grandparents always warned me when I was a kid, M said I shouldn't eat it while it was still warm. But I did, and it was wonderful.