It’s been a while since I’ve compiled a listicle here on the free tier, and I thought maybe it was time for one. As paid subscribers will know, I started making bread at the beginning of the month and haven’t stopped since. It is different from the type of baking I’m familiar with in many ways, but in many ways, it’s not. If nothing else, it’s an exercise in patience and recipe reading — which brings us to number one of the five things I’ve learned so far.
Five Things I Learned from Baking Bread
Recipes are important… — I am a notorious recipe ignorer. My signature move, whether baking or cooking, is to pull up two recipes, pick and choose the ingredients and steps I like from each, then haphazardly substitute ingredients I didn’t bother to check and see if I had before starting or just don’t feel like getting out, and morph them all into my own concoction. They sort of famously tell you not to do such things with baking, but I do anyway and have never burned the house down or made something completely inedible. Bread is very different though. Most recipes recommend using a food scale for ingredient weighing, which is, I’m told, more precise than using cups and milliliters. In my second loaf of bread, I decided to eyeball the salt and, surprise surprise, the bread turned out undersalted and bland — the first time failing to follow a recipe has failed me significantly.
…but they’re not that important — For as big of a deal as everyone makes about following recipes exactly, I have not once followed the recipe to the letter, whether from laziness, confusion, or failure to plan accordingly. My first batch of dough fermented in the fridge for an entire weekend, rather than the prescribed 20 hours, after I unwittingly started the dough too close to a weekend trip. My second loaf was under-salted but better in texture. In my third loaf, I strayed from the recipe by changing the type of flour I used (50:50 white to whole wheat), which resulted in the best loaf yet. My fourth loaf fermented on the counter overnight by mistake, and I didn’t realize until the morning that I forgot to add any salt at all, at which point I kneaded it in, bursting all of the precious air bubbles the food blogs praise. It’s re-fermenting on the counter at this very moment, so we’ll see how it tastes after baking. In each loaf, I used more water than the very specific amount the recipe calls for. They say you must understand the rules before breaking them, but I think it’s more fun to experiment and learn the hard way.
Good things (famously) take time — The (mature) starter alone has to ferment for several hours after feeding, before using it for bread-making. Then, the autolyse (flour and water mixture) has to sit roughly an hour before combining with the starter (and the salt — don’t forget the salt). Then the newly-formed dough sits for another several hours before folding and tucking the corners and letting it sit in the fridge for almost a full day before finally baking. The longer it sits, generally, the more sour the sourdough, which is kind of the whole point of the bread. It’s not labor-intensive, necessarily, but it is hard to wait for delicious bread, especially when you’ve improvised the recipe and don’t know for sure whether or not it’ll turn out. Even after the bread has been baked, there’s more waiting. The bread has to cool on a baking rack for several hours before slicing into it, to avoid collapsing. Good bread, like all good things, unfortunately, can’t be rushed.
Sometimes you have to repeat things, and that’s okay — As a relatively novice bread-maker, I have to check in with a recipe every time I make another loaf, and there are always steps I forget about that feel redundant. Some recipes say to re-fold the dough every hour during the 5-ish hour bulk fermentation process. Some don’t say anything about it. Some have you refold once at the end, before popping the dough in the fridge for a day. I don’t know the reason for all the discrepancies among recipes, or why you would or wouldn’t fold the dough in on itself several times (although I think it’s something about forming gluten and/or air bubbles). When all the folding starts to feel redundant and I want to start grumbling about all the work it takes or how many times I have to clean my countertops off, I check in with myself about why I’m feeling grumbly instead of thankful that I have the time to fold dough multiple times a day. Eventually, I get into a flow and find that I don’t want to put the dough away and let it finish fermenting, I just want to keep folding it back on itself and daydreaming.
You don’t need all the things they say you do — Every recipe I’ve seen calls for a banneton (bread basket) and rice flour. I have neither of those things and haven’t bothered to invest in either. Might a banneton be life-changing? Sure, but I have the unique privilege of not having had my life changed by one, so I don’t know what I’m missing. As far as I’m concerned, my loaves come out circular instead of oblong from shaping in a bowl instead of a basket, and that’s the only notable difference. Sure, rice flour is supposed to prevent the dough from sticking to the banneton, but regular flour works fine with my bowl method, and the bread has turned out perfectly delightful, if a bit ragged, even when I’ve forgotten to flour the bowl at all. The only piece of kitchenware I think is really non-negotiable is a Dutch oven, only because I don’t know how you’d bake it without one. I think this lesson extends to most things in our capitalism-drenched lives: we don’t need a specific device for cutting and scooping an avocado, we don’t need another step in our skincare routine or that one shirt in every color they make. When the ads say “You’ve got to try this,” they’re almost always wrong, which is easy to forget when the thing they’re pedaling is shiny and promises us a chance at a whole new, happy life.
oops, it’s poem time
I forgot to be in a retrospective mood
a reflective, reflexive, reminiscing mood
the mood to romanticize and theorize
maybe I’ll go to ikea
and get vegan swedish meatballs
or maybe I’ll reinvent the wheel
san fran
an hour after telling you I was content
with my life I started shopping
for condos I can’t afford in a city
I’ve been to once
because my friend was woken up by a cruise ship
and I wanted to feel the ocean breeze
between my eyelashes
(if someone wants to give me $500,000
that would be really cool)
easter candy
turns out when you’re actually hungry
the ears of a chocolate bunny
just don’t cut it I’ve cut open
both of my pointer fingers
in the last two weeks and my friend
got a toe infection from a pedicure
Despite just having written about how valuable patience is, blah blah blah, I really can’t wait for my bread dough to finish fermenting so I can bake it and eat it. I really want to know how it’ll taste since I added the salt about 14 hours too late and also left it to ferment on the counter longer than intended. I might just throw it in the oven after this and see how it turns out. Worst case scenario, I make another loaf. Anyways, this is the part of the newsletter where I tell you to have a great weekend and to find somebody to be nice to. Live, laugh, love ya.