Bread

by JS

Bread has become something of a topic around here. We liberated a bread machine from Ana’s mother’s over the holidays, and since then, well, bread making has become a kind of staple, a process against which all other cooking and eating pursuits are measured, hours of automated kneading ticking away as we (well mostly Ana) calibrate, calculate, and finally  cook our way out of a week’s worth of meals.

[Aside: We do our primary shopping on Sunday, which has become Mussels day, seeing as how the main ingredient should be bought fresh and cooked immediately. Mussels, however you prepare them, almost always result in some sort of sauce that is perfect for bread dipping.]

As any bread aficionado knows, once you get into bread, you invariably uncover Mark Bittman’s no-knead bread. It is a kind of holy grail, the simplest, most pure elements of bread made without any kneading (such as a liberated bread machine might accomplish) thus preserving the essential, unmasticated and undamaged qualities of the dough, unruffled by your callous fingers and bad mojo. The real science behind the idea has something to do with moisture and steam and crumb, and frankly I don’t care. I want to focus instead on something I’m angling to call the bullcut.

At about 2:23 in the linked video, the master bread maker goes from a somewhat stringy mass to a perfectly and roundly shaped dough. This, like the infamous bullshot, is all captured in the magic moment of an instant. Well, let me tell you what happened in our kitchen over the magic span of that instant. The calm confines of our clean kitchen were reduced to disaster. Flour, once marshaled neatly and to a purpose, dispersed across the narrow confines of our kitchen as if blown by some hurricane force. Dough splattered, pans clattered, bystanders, people or vegetables, perished in the span of that simple jump cut.

My wife, in her cool analytical approach to problems, mentioned that perhaps the end result suffered for some sort of misdirection in the type of yeast. I don’t understand the particulars of categories in this regard, preferring to fill my head with fantasy over the facts regarding labels like instant and active. I instead prefer an explanation that, in the instance of one jump cut, a host of magical forces summoned by the baker possessed and transposed through alchemy the vile disaster that is no-knead bread into its malleable well behaved dough cousin. We have only to wait, for above our fridge right now, another potential disaster is festering.