52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Good question. How would Buddha respond? Perhaps with “I wouldn’t have to.”

  Except that wasn’t true. Reproducibility—consistency—was one of my primary goals. I needed another answer. But what? I suppose a true master might answer in that annoying Buddhist way by asking another question, and I considered, “How does the salmon find his spawning ground?” Not bad, but not wanting to mix foods, I instead replied to Katie, not in the manner of Buddha, but in the manner of the old Asian handyman in The Karate Kid: “Ah, my little seagull, you have so much to learn.”

  But not as much as I, for not only did I cheat (I’ll explain in a moment), but my Zen experiment had nearly landed me with a loaf of pure white bread. Working without a recipe seemed wonderfully liberating until, as I started to leave the kitchen after kneading the dough, I realized that I’d forgotten to add the whole wheat and rye flours.

  Zen dilemma. There was still time to adjust the bread, but . . . should I? I sat down and had a Platonic dialogue with myself in the kitchen. Possibly the whole-grain-flour omission was a sign that the bread was meant to be as white as I. On the other hand, it might merely be yet another indication that I was becoming an increasingly forgetful, middle-aged man who shouldn’t be baking without a recipe. Now, the point of the experiment was to get closer to the art of bread making. But must one be totally spontaneous in order to be in touch with the bread? You don’t go to the supermarket without a grocery list, merely picking items off the shelf that appeal at that moment in time. If you did that, you’d never have mayonnaise in the house.

  While I was having this fascinating discourse, the gluten was setting up, so when I finally decided that, Zen or no Zen, I simply didn’t like pure white bread, I had my hands full. It took several strenuous minutes of folding and twisting, but the whole wheat and rye flours eventually blended into a homogenous mix. More or less.

  The most revealing part of this exercise was the discovery that making decent bread in this manner wasn’t all that difficult. Letting go was. Even in the very first step, when I was ready to add water to a handful of flour to make the poolish. I knew I wouldn’t have enough control (what a loaded word—no wonder I’m a Zen flunk-out) if I simply put the bowl under the running tap, so I looked for something to put the water into first—and instinctively grabbed a measuring cup.

  Whoops. That clearly wouldn’t do. I used a tall drinking glass instead, but I found myself thinking, It’s about twelve ounces. Not fair. The clock was an even bigger problem. As much as I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t. Anne and I went for a walk during the proofing, but I was distracted and not “in the moment” because I feared the yeast would be exhausted before we returned, as the bread had been rising for over two hours. I knew that because I’d sneaked a look at the clock when I set the dough aside to proof.

  None of this should’ve been surprising to me. After all, I’m someone who weighs the water for coffee every morning—to the nearest gram. Need I say more? Zen Buddhism is about being in the here and now. For me, though, the clock on the kitchen wall was the whisperer in the concert, that tiny irritation that becomes so colossal it can drown out a symphony, taking you totally out of the experience. Just knowing it was something to avoid changed the experience from being about oneness with the dough to a test of self-control: Don’t peek!

  Yet by another measure, this exercise was a success. I had, after all, made bread without a recipe, by feel. And the bread?

  “I think it’s better than usual,” Katie offered.

  Certainly it was tasty, perhaps because of the longer rises, but I noted out loud that the crumb was the usual disappointment, soft and spongy as angel food cake, without any large air holes.

  “What’s with you and the air holes!” Katie yelled, exasperated and mystified at my obsession with this feature.

  “It’s not just the air holes, it’s the texture. It’s too soft and moist.”

  “I like it soft and moist. And I don’t know what you’re trying to improve on. I think it’s great!”

  I was so flustered that I forgot to thank her for the compliment.

  WEEK

  28

  A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

  What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

  —Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking at a United Negro College Fund event

  “What’d you forget?” Anne asked after biting into a slice of peasant bread.

  “It’s like eating air,” Katie added.

  “It tastes familiar,” Anne said, taking another bite.

  I’ll say.

  One often reads that bread made without salt is “insipid.” Except, of course, when it’s made in a renowned Tuscan restaurant using a traditional recipe. I was fairly distraught over my own insipid loaf. It didn’t even make for edible toast, and almost any bread tastes good once you toast it, but Anne reassured me, “You’re just off your game,” as she placed my mangled reading glasses in front of me.

  “Oh, you found them. Where were they?”

  “The clothes dryer.”

  Off my game? More like off my rocker. Forgetting the salt was the culmination of a week during which I had experienced a series of mishaps worthy of Mr. Magoo, all of them due to forgetfulness or confusion. I’ll spare you the details because I suspect that anyone over the age of fifty could supply his or her own version of them, but suffice it to say that the week’s adventures included losing both pairs of prescription glasses plus my sunglasses, brewing coffee onto the kitchen floor (weighing the water doesn’t help if you forget to replace the pot), deleting an important computer file at work, forgetting Anne’s birthday for the first time in twenty-five years, and, most baffling of all, turning left when a sign displayed an arrow pointing right.

  In that last instance, when I’d realized something was amiss and backtracked to the intersection, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The left-pointing arrow now clearly pointed to the right! What was this, a Road Runner cartoon? Had Wile E. Coyote flipped the sign around on me? Forgetfulness was one thing, but confusion, lack of recognition, not being able to follow a clearly marked street sign, was something else.

  Was I experiencing early dementia? (Or in retrospect, was I just obsessed with cartoon analogies?) “I think I need to see someone,” I told Anne.

  “You’re just tired. Give it some time and see if it improves.”

  But now . . . I’d forgotten to add salt to the bread. Enough time.

  ——————————————

  “I’m going to say a letter, and I want you to say as many words as you can that begin with that letter—no proper names like Tom or Jane—as quickly as you can.”

  Once I’d decided to have my memory loss and confusion evaluated, I faced the problem of whom to see. I was doing this behind Anne’s disapproving back, and I felt awkward going to my regular neurologist. Plus, he’s the guy I see for my pinched nerve, and I didn’t want him asking about my dementia every time I came in for a sore neck. Then I remembered (remarkably enough) that I work in a psychiatric research institute, where they know a thing or two about dementia, so I approached the head of the geriatrics division.

  “Beeelll,” he said in his elegant Italian accent, making my mundane name sound like a character in an Italian opera, “I don’t-a-think you have anything to worry about. You know, we see an interesting thing. Patients who come in and think they have Alzheimer’s almost never do.” As he spoke, his hands waved through the air as if directing actors around a stage. “Yet the patients who do have Alzheimer’s are in denial. They insist they are healthy.”

  Just like the mosquito, I said. I’d read once that only female mosquitoes bite (to obtain blood for their eggs), but only male mosquitoes buzz (it’s a mating call). Thus, on a summer night, when you hear a mosquito buzzing, you needn’t worry. It’s when you don’t hear anything that you should move indoors.

  “Exactly,” he said, his large hands going in
to motion again. He didn’t think that leaving salt out of bread was such a big deal, explaining that memory requires attention and focus. In other words (I’m paraphrasing liberally here), you can simply be too busy to remember things. “From everything you’ve told me, you’re probably just under stress. It sounds like you are very busy.”

  Stress? Busy? To be sure, I was no Leeuwenhoek, virtually ignoring my vocation while fiddling with my avocation in the kitchen all day, but I wondered if my determination to bake the perfect loaf had approached or even crossed the line from passion to, well, something less healthy. I thought of Katie yelling, “Dad, what’s with you and the air holes!”

  It looked as though we were done. I’d just get some rest and—“You say you are making breads,” he mused as I started to rise.

  “Bread,” I corrected him. “Just one kind.” I was tempted to joke, “Two, now; peasant and pane Toscano,” but thought better of it. He was, after all, Italian.

  “Just one kind?” His words hung in the air as I eased back into my seat. “I would suggest,” he continued, “if it would make you feel better, we can do an evaluation. Of course, everything is confidential.”

  That last part was important. Having this testing done at work violated my time-honored principle of not crapping where I nest. Did I really want my colleagues performing a psychiatric evaluation on me? But it was only a memory test, nothing to be ashamed of, and after all, these were the experts.

  The next morning I reported to the lab at nine thirty. I was able to do reasonably well in the word-recall test, in which you are read a long list of words and asked to recall as many as you can. I thought I’d aced the cognitive tests, such as assembling colored blocks to match a drawing, and the motor-skills test, putting some pegs into a pegboard. I was, in fact, sailing along until we came to a new game: beat the clock. The research assistant explained that she would give me a letter, and I’d have to name, in a limited time, as many words as I could—but no proper names—that began with that letter.

  The research assistant readied her stopwatch. “No proper names, remember. Ready? Letter f.”

  “Frank.”

  She looked at me funny. Was I being a wise guy?

  I wanted to say, “The adjective meaning ‘honest,’ not the common name,” but that would’ve eaten up too much of my time. Still, I wondered if she was counting or discounting the word, while precious milliseconds flew (flew—hey, there’s one I missed!) by. I moved on.

  Inexplicably, the very next word that popped into my head was fellatio.

  Well, I couldn’t say that! Problem is, the word wouldn’t budge. I tried to think of another word. Fellatio. No, go away! I pleaded silently, but it refused, standing erect and blocking every other word beginning with fin the dictionary. Why was this happening? Should I just say it and move on? It is, after all, a valid word, and it’s not as if it’s that other f-word, the four-letter one. And speaking of which, of all the letters in the alphabet, why did they have to choose the loaded letter f?

  But guarantees of confidentiality notwithstanding, I feared that if I released it, within hours the entire institute would be hearing about the director of technology’s dirty mind or, even worse—much, much worse—his sexual harassment of the young research assistant. This was becoming a nightmare. I had to come up with another word, but every time I tried, that damn fellatio reared its ugly head.

  At this point, I imagine I may be raising some speculation as to why I became fixated—damn, that’s another word I missed—on that particular word, so it’s probably a good idea to pause and discuss this, and let’s all be adults about this and do it without smirking, thank you. I don’t think I got fixated on fellatio because I always have sex on my mind.* Nor was it because the test was being administered by a young woman. No, I think it’s because Federico freakin’ Fellini was sitting in the next room, no doubt waving his hands, and Italian was on my mind.

  I’ve always admired the word fellatio. It sounds so Italian, full of vowels and soft consonants, so exotic and lyrical, suggestive of a Roman orgy. By contrast, the English word commonly used for the act sounds harsh and crude to the ear, ending in a hard, clicking consonant. Why would anyone say “suck” when you can use the very same lovely four-syllable, vowel-dripping word that Julius Caesar himself used?

  What can I say—I have a good vocabulary. Still, there was no way I was going to say that word to that woman. Especially since I was in a psychiatric research institution. Anything is possible here. What if this test was not really a memory test at all but a psychiatric evaluation in disguise? after all, she wasn’t just counting the words I was saying; she was writing them down. Sounds a touch paranoid? Well, then, maybe the test was designed to induce paranoia! after all, I was in a psychiatric research institution (did I mention that already?).

  As I was having this lengthy and fascinating (another f-word I missed) discussion with myself, precious seconds ticked by, and I realized I hadn’t said a f—ing word in what seemed an eternity. The evaluator’s gaze bore down on me as beads of sweat started popping on my forehead. I’d been warned by Fellini that subjects sometimes become upset and storm out of these tests; now I could see why. Meltdown approached. Sirens were whooping, red lights were flashing, I could feel my mouth moving, but nothing was coming out of it. Oh, fudge!

  “Fudge,” I croaked, barely audible, breaking the mental block.

  “Foot. Find. Fred—no, forget Fred. Forget!”

  “Time’s up,” she said, expressionless.

  “Now tell me as many words as you can that begin with the letter s.”

  “Suicide.”

  WEEK

  29

  Kneadless to Say

  Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail out of it.

  —Groucho Marx in Duck Soup

  “Oh, jeez,” I moaned to Anne when I came home from work. “Connie’s bringing in bread Monday. A”—I made quotation marks with my fingers—“‘fantastic new, easy-to-make’ bread she wants me to taste.”

  “Bittman’s no-knead?”

  “What else?”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  I’d stopped telling people I was making bread, because the next thing out of their mouths was invariably, “Have you tried that no-knead bread?”

  I told Anne I was going to tattoo the answer onto my forehead (right under “No, kids, I am not making croissants”) and save them the trouble. Even when I wasn’t talking bread, I couldn’t escape this glutinous tidal wave. Once, while we were looking at Dutch ovens in a kitchen-supply store, a salesman wandered over and offered, unsolicited, “They’re great for making that no-knead bread.”

  “That no-knead bread” was a reference to an article by the New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, who’d breathlessly described a “revolutionary” new method of baking bread that produced an “incredible, fine-bakery quality, European-style boule” that “a 4-year-old could master.”

  That assessment (Bittman raised the minimum age to eight) came from the recipe’s creator, Jim Lahey of Manhattan’s Sullivan Street Bakery. For home bakers, Lahey promised no less than the holy grail: easy-to-make bread that required almost no time and effort—and, most notably, no kneading—yet produced a fantastic crust and perfect crumb.

  If a kitchen technique ever needed a good PR firm, it’s kneading, with its reputation as an onerous, burdensome process to be avoided at all costs. Kneading can be tedious if done by hand, but most kitchens these days probably have either a food processor or a stand mixer, both of which do a perfectly fine job without effort, although by now I’d completely stopped using mine. Having been forced to knead by hand in our Maine rental cottage, I’d discovered how easy it was if preceded by a twenty- to thirty-minute autolyse. That resting period for the dough (combined with the already-developed gluten in the levain) does much of the preliminary work for you, greatly shortening the kneading time. Thus after returning fro
m Maine I’d stuck with hand kneading, a seven-minute process I found relaxing and enjoyable. With each week I was becoming more familiar with the dough, able to tell by feel when it was ready and when it wasn’t, a skill you never acquire when kneading by machine.

  Still, after months of being asked about no-knead bread, I decided it was high time to find out what everyone else was talking about. I dug out the recipe and, to my surprise, immediately found something appealing about it that I had originally missed: the promise of a perfectly steamed crust. Like me, Bittman had struggled to make adequate steam in his home oven, even “filling a pot with stones and preheating it, then pouring boiling water over the stones to create a wet sauna (quite effective but dangerous).”

  To say the least.

  Lahey’s recipe, though, required neither hot rocks nor kneading to produce a perfect artisan boule. What was his secret? A wet, wet dough; an eighteen-hour autolyse in place of kneading; and a heavy pot, covered for the first half hour of baking.

  It all made perfect sense. If the dough was wet enough, the strands of gluten could move around and align themselves without being forced into place physically. The wet dough took care of the need for steam as well, for it steamed itself inside the pot. Not owning a Dutch oven (if the salesman’s pitch had been, “They’re great for roast chicken,” I might’ve), I borrowed a wonderfully ancient oval one of cast aluminum, which Anne’s brother had grabbed from their mother’s kitchen before I could get my hands on it, and got to work. This really was a wet dough—the hydration was a dripping 75 percent or so. After letting the dough sit overnight on the countertop, I set out the next morning to form a boule as directed. Except it was impossible to form anything with this gloppy mess. “Put dough seam side down on towel,” the recipe instructed. Seam? How could you possibly have a seam with this glop? It wasn’t dough; it was thick batter. I wondered if I’d made my mixture too wet. If so, it wasn’t my fault; the recipe gave all the ingredients in volume (grrrr!), using the unreliable “scoop and sweep” method for measuring flour, no doubt a concession to the home bakers without kitchen scales at whom the article was aimed.