Bread

I’m giving in.

Since we all retreated into our homes, I’ve spent quite a bit of time baking: several loaves of banana-apple bread, countless cookies, cinnamon rolls, pizza dough, lady fingers, and a shockingly well-risen sponge cake topped with sugar-sweetened strawberries from our CSA and freshly whipped cream.

I didn’t want to give in to the bread-baking craze. I tried to hold off. But yesterday, I couldn’t take it anymore. I baked some bread.

Bread-baking is not a discipline that suits me particularly well. It requires precision and patience, which have never been my strengths. It’s finicky, and I prefer a more easy-going baked good. It does its own thing, and I prefer something I can predict, like an algebraic sum, the same result from the same formula, every time. It’s a time- and energy-intensive endeavor, and the tiniest disturbance can ruin all that effort.

I don’t care for it.

However, recently I read about someone who bakes bread once a week as a sort of devotional. A meditative and centering and almost humbling exercise. That suits me. If I can get past my own inertia, I can admit that a devotional shouldn’t be something that’s easy; it should be a practice that stretches you. Changes you. With time and effort, it should allow you…to rise.

(Do you get it? Rise? LIKE—LIKE BREAD DOUGH?! SHOULD I EXPLAIN IT AGAIN?)

Luckily, I had a jar of yeast squirreled away in the fridge before the mad run on baking supplies, so I used that to make this loaf, along with whole wheat and molasses. Despite a disappointing denseness (But why? Who knows? Could be any number of things! How do you troubleshoot bread?! Even if you can, everything will be different next time!), the crust was soft and shiny, and the wheat flour and molasses lent a sweet heartiness to the thick, warm slices which we immediately slathered in butter and stuffed into our mouths.

But now I’m so angry. Because even though I know it’s going to frustrate and annoy me, I want to do more of it. Is this what everyone is experiencing? Is this why we haven’t completely abandoned baking bread at home over the millennia? Because even though it’s basically a crap shoot as you place each loaf in the oven and cross yourself hoping it turns out all right, it still seems as though taking flour and water and turning it into bread is like feeding ourselves with magic?

Making bread feels like a practice in living: we give the best of ourselves to something that may not turn out right. Then, regardless of the results, we get up the next week, or the next day, and we do it again. Slowly, we get better. We learn. We get things wrong. We try again.

It’s infuriating. It’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.

But it turns out I don’t so much mind an exercise in futility. Which is why today I’m mixing up a starter to place on the window sill so it may collect the wild yeasts from the air. I will nurture and fret over it like I have in the past—but maybe this time my devotion will result in a loaf that rises into something wonderful, simply through a patient practice of offering water and wheat to the air, and placing it in the heat of a fire.

Like magic.