Our daily bread

Another Friday, and another batch of challah is rising on the kitchen counter. At the other end of the counter, the heel of a loaf of sandwich bread waits for someone's lunch. Probably mine. Every week I make challah and sandwich bread, the challah according to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar (every Shabbat is a holy day, a feast and a celebration), the sandwich bread according to the rhythms of our hunger.

Neither the challah nor the sandwich bread is complicated to make. I use the bread machine to mix and knead the ingredients, and to contain the first rise of the dough. The second, shaped rise happens as it can, on the counter covered by a napkin, or in the warm oven if the kitchen is too cold or the time is too short. Every week, every loaf is a little different from the ones that came before it. This is no mechanized bakery, optimized for proven results. This is only a home kitchen, grubby and imperfect, run by an unskilled baker whose head, all too frequently, is in too many places at once.


Take last Sunday, for example. A loaf of sandwich bread was on the agenda. But I forgot all about it until nearly one o'clock in the afternoon. A few minutes of flurry got the process started, and I did manage to remember to take shape the dough and leave it, covered, in the bread pan after leaving a reasonable amount of time for the first rise.

Fast forward several hours. We went into the kitchen to sit down to dinner -- take-out Indian -- and I gave a sudden yelp. I'd forgotten all about the dough. Unbaked in the pan, it had risen an inch or two higher than it should. Ooops. I willed the oven to preheat in record time and threw in the loaf while we ate dinner. Then, of course, I forgot to take the bread out of the oven at the usual time. More yelps. Then, to top it all off, I forgot to put the cooled loaf in a plastic bag before I went to bed that night. Another round of yelps when I came downstairs the following morning.

Here's the thing, though. The bread was fine. Yeah, the crumb -- the interior texture of the bread as defined by the tightness and regularity of the air pockets within it -- was larger and more open than one usually expects from sandwich bread. The crust was a little darker than I usually prefer it, and the heel of the bread wasn't just as perfectly fresh as it would have been if I'd remembered to store it properly. But it was still fresh and delicious. LG is on an extreme picky-eating jag -- all of sudden he's refusing to eat his usual mainstay, pasta, unless it comes from a restaurant. But even he munched happily on a piece of plain sandwich bread for a snack. I never regret having made the loaf, no matter how many misadventures it involves.

I make these two recipes, the challah and the sandwich bread, over and over again. Partially that's because I lack a sense of adventure. I get comfortable in my routines, and keep to them. But it's also because I love the flexibility of these recipes, the way the they respond well to whatever neglect or stimulation I can manage on any given baking day. They've taught me to love the forgiving nature of bread, the fact that it can be different every time and still be tasty, a pleasure to eat.

It's a lesson I need to extend to other parts of my life. There are many things worth doing even when they can't be done perfectly. But so many other factors conspire to make me feel otherwise. Like cookbooks. I've learned to love baking bread, and I love to study the history of food and cooking. That's why I keep getting suckered into buying big, sober tomes on bread by the erudite, passionate proponents of the artisanal bread movement. If you missed it, the artisanal bread movement posits itself in opposition to pre-sliced, artificial-ingredient supermarket bread that stays edible in its plastic bag for weeks. Artisanal bread is shaped by hand, not machine. It ferments for a long time, instead of being rushed quickly along by dough enhancers. It is ultimately about wringing the most flavor, the greatest sensual experience from the basic ingredients of flour, water, salt, and yeast. And the results can be nothing short of spectacular.

That sounds great, right? I mean, isn't that why I'm baking bread at home in the first place -- you know, to reject the plasticized conformity of mass produced food? Who wouldn't want to learn how to make what one baker describes as "world-class bread?"

World-class bread? This is where it starts getting away from me. This striving for perfection strikes me as ultimately undermining the tradition it strives to celebrate. So much of food preparation these days has been reassigned to the professional realm. We eat out; we bring home take-out food, pre-cooked meals from the market, frozen foods that need just a few moments in a warm oven. Or we open a jar, add an egg to a powdered mix from a box.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. I don't want to romanticize cooking at home, or cooking from scratch. It's time-consuming and tedious. The professionalization of food preparation has freed up so much of our time for other pursuits. But it's also made home cooking skills somewhat elitist, more the pursuit of obsessive hobbyists dedicated to perfection than a survival skill necessary to feed oneself and one's family.

I want to at least interrogate this transition as it happens. Should only those people who can fix their interests with a laser-like attention to detail be able to claim the skills that everyone once shared to a greater or lesser degree? Is it necessarily a good thing to let one more avenue of human experience be split between those who do it remarkably well, and those who don't do it at all?

I want to preserve, at least a little, the tradition of good-enough home-baked bread. So I read these artisanal bread books for the history, and roll my eyes at the recipes. Oh, the cognitive dissonances they awaken. On the one hand, the proud traditions of bread-baking that go back centuries, to bakers who worked without measurements or thermometers, trusting that experience would help them make do with whatever conditions they found. On the other hand, the exhortations that the home baker seize a rigorous control over all materials: special flours that can only be mail-ordered; digital scales for exact measurements; strict instructions involving timers and temperatures.

I don't doubt that these instructions make for tastier bread. But if I kept to them, it's more likely that they would make for not baking bread in the first place. Which is better -- the perfect loaf of bread that's never made except in perfect conditions by professionals? Or the compromised, catch-as-catch-can loaf that any homemaking shlub once could have managed? The answer could go either way, I guess. But I know which loaf I'm having for lunch. It's quite good enough.