This past October, I shared with Slo Coast Journal readers an incident wherein I, at age 11 or 12, drafted a younger brother and sister to help me bake a cake while our parents were away at the movie house. Although that first effort culminated in a fiasco, my mother later helped me to bake my first cake. (See Tale of the Novitiate Baker, Part 1)
During the above period, the family lived in the Pacific side of the Panama Canal Zone. In the summer of 1944, my father entered the U.S. Merchant Marines, and my mother took her children to California to live with her youngest sister. My baking interest subsided until maybe two years later after we had moved twice to different homes in the Norco area of Riverside County. I then had the itch – I can't recall any distinctive trigger – to bake a loaf of bread. No need for further info. It's enough for you to know that the thick brown crust enclosed overly moist dough, the end product unfit even for Ferdinand Magellan's crew who circumnavigated the world a few hundred years ago and the sailors boiled their shoe leather for a meal or two.
Such a failure literally forced me once more to set baking interests aside. More importantly, my father rejoined his family after WW II. After the family moved from Norco to Corona, my dad's increasing inebriations led to a confrontation twixt he and I. Fortunately, circumstances developed that made it possible to move in with my aunt and uncle in Norco, and soon thereafter go with them to Fort Collins, CO. A year later, I returned to Corona, my father having returned to U.S. Merchant Marine service. By the end of 1948's summer, I had enlisted in the U.S. Army. And, no, the military didn't send me to baking school.
From my military discharge in 1952 – marrying in 1955, subsequently graduating from UCLA in 1958, my wife and I, along with our then fourteen year old son from her first marriage – moved to Carson, California from Redondo Beach into our first mortgaged home in October of 1959. Another year plus passed without my even thinking about baking anything.
And then, one calm, nicely tuned Indian summer morning in 1961, while reading the L.A. Times Sunday edition, Home Section, the paper offers a photo with recipe for pulla, a braided Finnish bread. Ah yessss, Finland, the ancestral home linked to my paternal lineage. The article teleported me back to when I was eight or nine. We were living in Balboa, Canal Zone when my father's grandmother moved in with us for a few weeks. She baked pulla. The braided rolls fascinated me. (At age 85, still sporting a full set of her own teeth, brushed daily with regular table salt, she left for Valhalla without knowing she had contributed to my doughy future.) Could the scent of yeast and the aroma of baking bread have imprinted me during that long ago? I can't say for sure, but I can tell you that I felt compelled to take the recipe and buy some cakes of yeast and to jump in the baking game anew.
Eureka! Forget those long ago high moments achieved through baking birthday cakes. Set aside that ungodly failure of trying to bake bread in Norco. Even now I can hear the trumpets heralding my success. For sure, mixing dried, sweetened fruits into the braids and topping the rolls with shaved almonds pleased the palate, but also encouraged me to later branch out into baking different kinds of pastries, breads, and rolls.
Referencing my great grandmother's baking requires me to share a different Canal Zone story overheard in my formative years. The story involves a wealthy family with a Chinese chef who regularly served delicious rolls. When the man prepared the dough, he never allowed anyone in the kitchen to watch. One day, the lady of the house peeked through the kitchen door keyhole. What she saw shocked her. The Asian servant took flour and water paste and chewed each mouthful well before spitting the slurry into a large ceramic bowl. Likely apocryphal, I wonder even to this day if such a process might deliver a satisfying, salivating taste.
Above story aside, my full entry into bread baking eventually led me to make a sourdough starter. By the time I moved into San Luis Obispo County that bread type fixed itself on the weekly menu with additional loaves baked when expecting company.
My wife fixed crispy tossed green salads. Instead of crackers or croutons, I sliced the sourdough extra thin, buttered them and toasted them light brown in the broiler; removed them and sprinkled parmesan cheese over the melted butter before returning them to the broiler for just a few seconds. Such a procedure provided an exotic moment to complement those salads. Enough so to where I recently brought my old crocks topside and expect to soon start a fresh batch of sourdough.
For those who never made a loaf of bread from scratch, who never double-kneaded a pliant, bubbly mix of flour, water, and yeast, shame on you. Especially men who have never made the effort to bake a yeasty concoction with their own hands. (Note: bread making machines don't count!)
Should you yield to my suggestion to jumpstart a bread baking effort, begin by demanding submission from the leavened fungi/flour/water mix once the fermentation begins. Speak to the rising dough with a field sergeant's barking commands. Compel its submission by kneading, a kneading that makes you a magician, a soothsayer. With strong shoulders and firm grasps you must punch, pound, and twist the finished product before letting it stand for further fermentation (some recipes call for a second round of pummeling after the uncooked dough has doubled).
Some closing suggestions: start simple, start small. With those two admonitions in place, approach the process as if you possess supernatural powers. Stand in the shoes of those early alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. It will not hurt to wave a wizard's wand over the bread pans when putting them into the oven. And stay within a recipe's boundaries. Save fancy accouterments for the pros. Oh, one more thing: good luck!
Throughout the whole ordeal of your first attempt, keep in mind that if it weren't for bread and onions the Great Pyramids of Giza might never have been constructed.
