Bread

           My mother was a city girl, grew up in Tucson when it was a the cross roads of the depression with trains going west to California and travelers going north and south on ancient pathways from Mexico to Canada.  At that point in history is was most famous for the TB sanitariums for wealthy people from the east.

           After she married my father, a farm kid from South Dakota, she decided to learn to bake bread like all the women of his family.  That tale famously was repeated many times to me by my mother. 

            "There are sometimes in life that can't be learned out of a book, that can be learned if you don't have a teacher that stands right next to you.  One of them is breadmaking, Loretta."

             "Did you ever try, Mother?'

             "Oh, I tried but I was no good at it.  I never told your father because he was always comparing me to his mother and sisters.  I made bread.  It was so bad I feed it to the chickens before you Dad came in from the field."

              "How could it be that bad?  What happens?"

               "There are just something in life you have to learn as kid like farming, a city kid can go out as an adult become a farmer.  I believe breadmaking is the same way.  There is a feel for it, knowing how much to knead it and working with yeast, that is a whole skill in doing that.  No, breadmaking has to be taught as a young girl."

              For my whole life I accepted that story as fact.  I had put the skill of bread making on the list of things I was not going to do because of this fable in my family.  Once I owned a new bread making machine but quickly lost interest in it as I would have only spent time for extraordinary bread not white bread that smelled up the house in a Martha Stewart way.  Truly artisan breads were my interest, but the fable said not in this life time, until this month.

              In Arces magazine there was an article by Lauren Chattman about whole grain breads.  I was hooked.  She wrote about different grains, protein, fermentation, flavor in ways I never heard before.  I want to include more seeds and nuts in my diet and as I was reading her story about bread, I realized this is the easy way to do it.  Then the family story about bread making popped into my mind.  Well, I answered the story by saying, I have chickens.

               I copied the eight grain and seed pan loaf recipe and let it hang around my kitchen counter for about a week.  One day I picked it up and headed to a bulk food store and started buying the ingredients.  The following Saturday was rainy and my gardens show was on the radio.  The evening before I made what Chattman calls the soaker, enough for two loafs.  The soaker is the a mixture of seeds and nuts soak overnight to bring out the flavor and sweetness.   The whole process took a long time on Saturday, it seemed like to me.  But the loaves turned out great.

               Farming, maybe, a skill that is learned as a child but I can say for sure that, skill of making bread, can be self taught later in life.