Staff of Life
One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.
She’d cover it with a teatowel and set it to rise, until the dough would be lifting the centre of the towel slightly. Once it was risen she’d tip the dough out and knock it back before dividing it up into buns and plaits (if I’d been good, I was allowed to do some plaiting…). She’d lay ‘em out on baking sheets to recover slightly, then, just before they went into the oven they’d get a quick egg or milk wash and a quick sprinkling of poppy seeds.
I used to love baking days, the house smelt wonderful for ages (it’s no wonder that ‘they’ say that if you want to sell your house you should have some bread baking when people come to visit) and there was the fabulous treat of splitting a slightly too hot bread bun, spreading it with far too much butter and wolfing it down. Bought bread was never as good as the stuff mum used to make.
As I grew up, mum got busier at work, and I never really learned to make my own bread. We ended up with a bread machine that makes perfectly decent bread that’s better than bought bread, but that’s about all you can say for it. Then, when we were in the US, we kept going to good restaurants which served us fantastic sourdoughs and rye breads, and I thought (and said to Gill) “I’ve got to have a go at that!” and promptly forgot about it when we got back to the UK as we dealt with the pressing matters of trying to get the house sold, and Gill off to Newcastle and the million and one other shocks that flesh is heir to.
But Gill didn’t forget. She booked me (at astonishingly short notice) onto a Bread Matters Fundamentals course at the Village Bakery in Melmerby. So, a couple of weekends ago, off I went and learned how to make sourdough breads, croissants, chollah (which appears to be the same as the bread my mum used to make), borodinsky, ciabatta (which is something of a pain in the bum to make let me tell you; worth the effort though).
I’ve hardly stopped baking since I got back, I make at least a couple of pain campagne with a mixture of wheat and spelt flour every week and hopefully, once I’ve got my rye sour back to the peak of health I’ll start making rye bread as well. It’s a strangely relaxing process, for all that the kneading can be hard work, possibly because the cycle is ‘work… wait… work… wait’, there’s time to relax between bouts of work. But I want a woodfired oven. Once we’ve moved up to the north east properly we’ll be looking for a plot to build our own house on, and the plans will definitely incorporate a bread oven. And a darkroom. And a ‘chapelly’ place with good acoustics for making music. And…
