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Food
& Other Important Things,
by Don Curto
Bread:
Its mystery and fascination
Quite a long time ago, I talked before a women’s group about food.
The planned topic was “Food, Art and Grace,” but as frequently
happens with my food interest, the subject narrowed to bread.
Several women at the supper table with me were home bread bakers and
one of them had a bread machine. My dislike of this machine is precisely
because it is a machine: ingredients in, close the door, set the time,
take out the product. Not a bad idea for some foods, but bread has a
spirit at work and the machine hides the spirit. If you don’t believe
that instinctively, I probably will be unable to persuade you.
Think about it for a moment. One takes some wheat that has been ground
to a fine powder, adds some warm water, some yeast and some salt if
one wishes, although it is not a necessary ingredient. Some Tuscan breads
served in Florence are salt-free.
Mix these together (if your yeast is newly purchased, you really don’t
even have to “proof” it) into a gooey mess. Dump it out of
your mixing bowl and start to knead. If your recipe’s proportions
are right, you will begin to feel this strange mixture become “dough.”
It will no longer be flour, water, salt and yeast. It will begin to
live, to display a force working against you—you press down and
turn, the dough begins to acquire elasticity and resist your pressing.
The spirit has entered into the mixture, right before your eyes, brought
there by your hands and skill in putting the right ingredients together.
If you are a bread person, you will feel life under your hands. Set
this new mixture aside, and it will grow as you watch and if you are
patient, it will grow to a new size. If you press it down and try to
punch this new life out of the dough, it will grow again.
Now you put it into the oven and it continues to grow until the temperature
is so high (about 135 degrees Fahrenheit) that the yeast is killed and
the loaf is stabilized. When baked, it becomes an important supporter
of human life: in the morning, toast and rolls; at lunch, bread for
sandwiches or with soups or salads; in the evening, rolls with dinner.
Bread is everywhere in our lives. I am a serious skeptic when it comes
to miracles, but the production of a loaf of bread, worked by hand,
seems to me to be so remarkable that it goes beyond mere obvious chemistry
and sits at the very edge of awe.
The Egyptians “invented” yeast-leavened bread and that invention
raised them above all other peoples in the ancient world. Most of the
inhabitants of the ancient world lived on a cereal food made by roasting
grains on hot stones with water to form a paste. Sometimes the paste
was spread on hot stones until it was baked to a hard and tough sheet.
This preserved it, but removed the taste. Porridge was made by heating
the grain and water mixture over a fire. Porridge and flat breads, flat
breads and porridge remained the food for many centuries. Even the Romans
lived on porridge for a long time. If it wasn’t for the people
of Egypt, the world might never known about bread.
The Egyptians did something significantly different in the handling
of the grain and water mixture: most people cooked it to preserve it
or threw it away. The Egyptians set some of the mixture aside to decay—or
ferment, as we now know.
The process of fermentation was known for a long time and only understood
in the seventeenth century when the Dutchman Van Leeuwenhock saw yeast
as cells under his microscope. Pasteur proved that yeast is a living
organism. The early Egyptians didn’t know this, but they did know
that when they baked the funny smelling fermented mixture, the product
was like nothing else ever tasted. They also knew that this new product
could not be baked on the coals of an open fire, so by trial and error,
they constructed the first bread oven.
From time to time, one will hear of some baker (it happened to me just
recently) say that all his bread contains is flour, water and salt—there
is no yeast. What he (or she) means is that no commercial yeast, in
a package, was added to the bread. But, of course, if one makes a leavened
loaf of yeast bread, there is yeast in it.
The air around us contains bacteria and yeast spores, just looking for
a place to land for nourishment.
If you mix water and flour and let it remain out, uncovered, for eight
to twenty-four hours, you will find that it begins to bubble, pick up
some movement and smell sour. Fermentation has begun and you are on
the way to producing sourdough starter. This starter, added to your
flour, water and salt mixture, becomes the “yeast.” And if
you don’t wish to go through this process each time you make a
new loaf of bread, you can save some of the “starter” and
begin a new starter. Thus sourdough starters in the olden days were
of great value and transported all across our country—which is
how we got San Francisco sourdough bread. The gold miners of the 1840s
helped this bread become famous, of course.
After the Fleischmann brothers brought fresh yeast to America from Europe
in the 1860s and with the invention of active dried yeast in World War
II, there was very little need for the sourdough starter, except for
its unusual taste and a kind of food religion that has grown up around
it. The use of baking powders became popular in the 1850s in this country
as an antidote for yeast, thought by some health fanatics to be poisonous,
Sylvester Graham among them.
But the various baking powders were soon limited to the thin mixes,
such as griddle cakes and for quick breads, muffins and biscuits. This
is where things stand now. As the last word on leavening, some commercial
breads are aerated mechanically and yeast is added only for flavor.
Whipping a dough is quicker than waiting for yeast to grow.
The interest in the more European-style breads, both the so-called health
food varieties and the merely healthy loaves has continued and grown
greatly. Probably the local innovator in the health food loaves was
the Sweet Water Café. They were joined by Babycakes Muffin
Company. Sweet Water and Babycakes products are on sale at each establishment
and prominently displayed at the Marquette Food Co-op on Baraga Avenue.
The largest independent bread baker in Marquette probably is the Huron
Mountain Bread Company, whose tenth anniversary is being celebrated
this year.
Merely because it is lodged in a supermarket, the bakery in Econo Foods
should not be overlooked. They produce some excellent breads, from “scratch”
as the saying goes, without the use of mixes.
For most of us, bread remains “staff of life.”
—Don Curto
Editor’s Note: This column first appeared in the June 1997 issue
of Marquette Monthly, and can be found in Curto’s book, Stirring
It Up!
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