loafing around.

(I'm back, bad bread puns and all. Finally have the time to treat this little lady of a blog right. Promise there are more posts to come.)

There's something cathartic about baking bread. It just doesn't...give any shits about anything else going on, save maybe temperature. It's going at it's own pace regardless of what anyone else is doing (provided no one upends the bowl). Provided you can read and get the initial proportions right -- maybe expend a little energy kneading, too -- it will live. And become bread.

I always feel like the dough becomes for a short time the center of my universe, a star that despite its insignificant size I am compelled to orbit. I go on with whatever I have to do but on a leash because in the back of my mind ticks the bread clock, calling me back home to attend to some second or third rising at various hours of the day and night.

You can mix the flour-water-salt-yeast-maybe a fat together and clap your hands delightedly at the little taupe ball that will soon become something greater than the sum of its simple parts, and then you can come back in a few hours and see the bubbles dotting the surface as the yeast inside yawns, stretches, starts to wake; and then after you go to bed and come back in the morning you can be astounded at the gooey fermenting monster that looks as though it's about to burst out of the bowl and throttle someone. So then you can scoop it into your dutch over or pan or whatever you use and breathe a sigh of relief as the yeast, bless its fungal soul, dies and the rising stops and the flour crisps into something else, with a smell that settles right in the center of your body and says for god's sake eat me already.

It's soothing to know that can happen. You barely feel as though you're cooking at all but rather coaxing something into being. Ceremonies of water and flour, sacrifices of yeast and salt. Voila, food conjured.

I don't think I'm saying anything new. I remember reading something awhile back about the primal nature of bread and I think that's where these thoughts come from. The simplicity of bread appeals to us all.

Just been on a bread-making kick lately (got a dutch oven and Jim Lahey's 24-hour no work bread has called my/my housemates' names) so that's where this is coming from. Check out a sweet pic of loaf number one. Rosemary and garlic versions have since been tested to warm (immediately consumed) recepetions, as seen below.