Baking Bread With the Beard
“Bread will be my thing,” the Beard told me. And so it was. I’m free to bake cakes from 60-year old cookbooks and experiment with cinnamon rolls filled with peanut butter and jelly or candied bacon, but the bread belongs to the Beard. It was his birthday a couple of weeks back, and to help him in his journey along the path of flour and fermentation, I bought him a Ken Forkish’s “Flour Water Salt Yeast“, some tools, and a cast iron loaf pan.
Which could explain why we were up at 7 AM on our day off, covering the kitchen with flour.
On Cooking Together
The two of us admit to having our own faults in the kitchen. I have a habit of taking over everything, trying to manage whatever is on the stove while simultaneously prepping ingredients and taking pictures, handling everything as though I’m some many-armed Hindu goddess. The Beard, however, has no patience for things. He’ll glance over a recipe, see that there’s five ingredients that need to go into a dish, and simply add all of them to the pan without regard for the order they actually need to go in there.
It’s a matter of our personal styles and the ways we communicate with each other in the kitchen; I assume he can read my mind and that I know everything, and he assumes that if it’s all going into the same receptacle, there isn’t a specific order of operations. As a result, I do my experiments on days when he’s working, and he’s taken up baking bread.
The Battle of the Bread
So, as we stood in our robes counting cups of flour and trying to understand the specifics of the Saturday Morning Bread before we’d been adequately caffeinated, we had to work together to get things going. The directions are very clear in the book, but we both needed to really slow down and read them. Completely.
Every loaf of bread I’ve ever made starts with letting the yeast bloom. This bread started with mixing the flour and water and letting that sit. Ok… different, but that’s what it says in the book. Then Beard tells me that the yeast only gets sprinkled over the batter and hand mixed in, and I’m all “OMG THIS CAN’T BE RIGHT WHAT SORT OF WITCHCRAFT IS THIS?!?” But, he shows me in the book, yes, sprinkle it, fold it in, it says so right there, and points a floury finger at the page.
And so I shut up and let him do his bread. It’s his thing, after all.
To the Victor, the Spoils
Roughly eight hours after the Beard started his dough, we finished with two loaves of bread. They weren’t the perfectly formed, beautiful boules found in the bakery at the top of our street. Neither loaf was “Instagram-worthy”. Both had a snowy layer of flour baked into their tops, and their bottoms were a bit browner than he’d have liked. “They burnt,” he said.
“They’re artisanal,” I responded.
He sliced off a bit of the heel for me, and then another slice for himself. We ate those warm slices with some butter and they were delicious. Ultimately, we learned that we both needed to tone down our natural behaviors in the kitchen – me butting out and him slowing down – and in either case, it didn’t matter what the result looked like, as long as it was edible and we could share it together.
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The Tart likes to eat, cook, and bake things. She eats to work out, and she works out to be able to eat.
