Thoughts while kneading bread

I stumbled upon an old blog of mine--forgot all about it.
I like some of what I said then, so I am sharing it anew.

On a good bread day, when the humidity is just right, the yeast budding furiously and happily in their doughy world, when my hands work unconsciously, my dough comes together after about 15 minutes of kneading.

Fold and press, fold and press, fold and press.

An occasional turn of the dough. Fold and press. It will be ready when, as the adage goes, it feels like a baby's bottom. It usually takes me about 200 folds. The purists may push for 300 folds, but after 200 or so, it feels ready. I am middle-aged, and I only know the feel of a middle-aged woman's thigh. Enough for me.

Perhaps younger bakers yearn for the firmness of 300 folds. Let them yearn. They have more energy, and certainly more time.

Wheat grown on our classroom windowsill.

200 folds. Each fold doubles the number of layers of dough beneath my hands. 2...4...8...

Which would you rather have, the old teaser goes, a million dollars now, or a penny doubled every day for a month?

16...32...64...128...256...512...1,024.

Each layer makes the gluten strands stretch and layer upon itself. A network to catch the carbon dioxide released by the yeasts busy budfucking in the dough.

2,048....4,096...8,192...16,384...32,768...65,536...131,072.

Bread made by a friend, Jessica Pierce (photo by her)

Most of us in this part of the world do not exert a whole lot of energy. Most of the carbon dioxide we release comes from the decomposed ferns and trilobites and pterodactyls that we burn without a thought. Sunlight captured 10 million years ago combusts, consumes O₂, produces CO₂.

In the States, few folks walk anymore.

262,144...524,288...1,048,576...2,097,152....4,194,304....8,388,608

My dough doubles in size in less than two hours. The hot breath of yeasties, budding and budding and budding.

16,777,216...33,554,432...67,108,864...134,177,200...268,000,000....536,000,000

We screw. We fuck. We get laid. We score. We pant. Sex. A commodity. An end in itself. Few of us take the time to bud anymore. I want to make a bud. Asexual reproduction. Proof I matter. Silly thoughts. My brow beads with sweat. Kneading is hard work.

1,072,000,000...2,144,000,000...5,488,000,000....10,976,000,000...21,195,200,000...43,904,000,000...

Photo by Jessica Pierce

The moon is about 240,000 miles away. That's about 127, 200,00 feet. Or about 1,524,000,000 inches. The dough now has 40 times more layers than inches to the moon. And I am not even a quarter of the way through.

---

I have a 300 gallon puddle in my backyard. It has a lot of critters in it. One large koi. 2 bream I nabbed from a Newark park trying to catch tadpoles. Perhaps a few dozen nymphs. A hundred thousand copepods. And hundreds of millions of bacteria. Each critter no more aware of me than I of each of them.

87,808,000,000...175,616,000,000...351,232,000,000...702,464,000,000...1,404,928,000,000

My head hurts from counting. Too many critters to think about. 6 million people, give or take a million, slaughtered in Nazi concentration camps. 20 million Russians perished in the latest world war. Maybe a million less. Maybe a million more.

2,809,856,000,000...no more counting--sweat in my eyes.

Blueberries

I say a prayer when I toss my yeast down the drain after they convert raw honey and blueberries into a lovely blueberry mel that makes my legs wobble. Most are dormant from exhaustion, poisoned by the alcoholic milieu they created.

I doubt they hear my prayer.  Not sure anyone does.

The yeast in my dough are less lucky--they are living and breathing, and they will be baked.

While I no longer ponder their sentience, I no longer question their desire either. I hear the burbling of carbon dioxide gassing out the carboy as the yeast bud and bud and bud to exhaustion.

I feel most alive when my lifelong love and I share breath and energy. Get the cortex out of the way. The cortex developed late in the scheme of evolution. The medulla is where we fall in love.

We try to imagine the pain of millions dead. The challenge is to feel the pain of one creature dying.

I recoil at the thought of millions slaughtered. I get real quiet when I remember the slow death of my mother. Millions matter, of course, but only matter if I have the courage to recall my mother's strength. "We are born to die," she said. Maybe.

Just not so slowly. Not so painfully. Not so grotesquesly.

Fold and press and fold and press.

I have a recipe for bread from an ancient Yugoslovian woman. I know her grand-daughter. I taught her grand-daughter a little bit about medicine.

Her grand-daughter knows I love bread. Her grand-daughter is not so far removed from her grandmother's world that she does not recognize a wheat berry. She gave me her grandmother's recipe for potato bread.

"Why potato bread?" I asked. Dr. Elana bowed her head ever so slightly--she still had an old world respect for her teachers. "Because," she explained, "we had no grain during the war. We were starving."

Fold and press and fold and press.

"We were starving" before she was even born, and she still feels the pangs.

Fold and press and fold and press.

Almost done. I slap the dough. Almost right. It is warming up from the life inside.

Americans confuse sensuality and sexuality because we cannot see that the two cannot be separated. We pretend otherwise at our peril. We blame the Puritans.

I'd bet my loaf of bread that Puritans knew how to make love better than most of us. I know they could make bread better than us. Too easy to blame the Puritans.

I fold again. The dough snaps. The dough is ready.

I slap the dough. I like the sound. I slap it again. Millions and millions of layers. A fine net of gluten strands ready to catch the breaths of the jubilant yeast madly reproducing, respiring, realizing. This will be a good loaf. You can know before the first rise.

A prayer before I thrust the dough into the oven hours later. The yeast die noiselessly, and (good western man I am), without awareness.

But not without desire.

Food for thought

Wheat from our winter classroom windowsill.

Some abstract intangibles:

Light
 Electrons
Inertia

If you think you know light, but see the world as solid, you do not know electrons.
If you think you know electrons, but imagine them as circling protons like planets, you don't know inertia.
And if you don't know inertia, you cannot know mass.


Which is OK--few people do, and I am not one of them, but we all pretend we do in high school science, and we test kids like they do, and we reduce science to something mystical and powerful, creating a nation that believes in ghosts and astrology.

Gardens remind us--from seeds in February to fruit in July

Some concrete tangibles:

Water
Air
Bread

Bread is made of air and water, and little else.

Oh, we can delve into the specifics of photosynthesis and CO₂ and fermentation and all that good stuff we love to test, but in the end, the miracle is the stuff around us comes together, the stuff around us falls apart.

Doesn't take a high school diploma to see this, but plenty with advanced degrees do not.

From the bay, from the backyard.

And we're all paying for their ignorance.

When was the last time Gregory R. Page, the CEO of Cargill, had a loaf of bread from freshly ground wheat?

Breaking bread

In July, 1928, sliced bread debuted at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. The town now promotes itself as "The Home of Sliced Bread."

Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy, "a partnership high school between the School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. He recently spent 4 days at the Constructing Knowledge Conference (CMK), where he had the "chance to listen to, talk to, break bread with people like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Marvin Minsky and James Loewen,...."

"Break bread...."

Breaking bread has, for many, religious overtones. It's not a phrase you hear much anymore, and when you do, it's rarely literal.

At most conferences we share meals on our own sanitized plates using steam cleaned steel utensils to eat food made by strangers who often speak a different tongue.

Before Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine became ubiquitous, we had whole loaves in our homes. We literally broke bread at mealtimes.

I think we were closer together when we did, because we did.

***

I occasionally make bread. I grind the wheat (a workout), then mix the flour, yeast, butter, water, and honey. I knead (another workout), let the dough rise, punch it down, let it rise again.

It's good, it's healthy, it's whole. I share the first piece with Leslie just about every time. We break bread together.

When we have close friends over, we may leave a whole bread loaf on the table, to be broken by our hands. Sometimes, sadly, the loaf stays unbroken.




One year we grew wheat in class--we had dozens of stalks on the windowsills. 2 or 3 times a week I would remind the students where the wheat stalk "stuff" came from: water and the carbon dioxide from our exhaled breaths.

The emerging wheat berries amazed the children, as it still amazes me. Kids in these parts rarely see mature grass. They saw the wheat as just a giant grass plant until the berries appeared, just like the same berries they planted.

At the end of the year, we got a handful of wheat berries and I ground them up with others, made the bread at home, and after a brief chat reminding the class where the bread came from, we broke bread.

Some of the class could not stomach the idea of trying a piece--I'm not eating anyone's stinky breath! Those who tried it mostly enjoyed it, especially a few who grew up on real bread before they came to the States.

***

What does any of this have to do with Chris Lehmann?

He writes about the frustration of building a robot at the CMK conference last week. His team (barely) succeeded, and he writes about the value of the process, about the value of gumption when things we try do not work well.

I've always wanted to make bread from scratch in class. Truly scratch. Grind the wheat berries. Churn the butter. All kinds of science would be involved.

I could never figure out how to do it, and am still not clear, but I'm going to try it anyway. I'm going to present the problem to the class, and we're going to solve it, or not, but learn in the process.

If we come up short, I will still end the year with a home-made loaf of bread, to break together in class to honor of our time together.

The poster is from the town of Chillicothe--you can order the poster here.

The woman baking bread and the wheat photos are from the National Archives.