Bread — A Love Letter

Sometime early on in my relationship, before I was formally committed but after I had fallen madly in love, he told me he made bread. He would mix the dough the night before, and then he would wake up early in the morning and shape them so that after their final rise, they would go in the oven just as his family started to wipe the sleep-sand from the corners of their eyes. The thought of making bread alone intimidated me, so his thoughtful time-table he followed to make the bread was like putting butter on a donut. The image in my head was so excessive in its indulgence, so rich and saturated and romantic. So terribly misguided.

He doesn’t really make bread anymore, because his schedule has changed, and so a few months ago, I decided that I would make bread, and not just any bread, but I would make sourdough bread. Sourdough bread is special because it is borne of a sourdough starter, which basically means that you grow your own yeast as opposed to buying it in little highlighter-yellow packets from Target.

This is where I start to get overly evangelical — forgive me. Sourdough starter is actually quite easy to grow. You just mix some flour and water, and then leave it in a dark corner for a few days. But it still feels like magic to me, opening it on the third or fourth day and finding a life borne of little more than my fingers. There are bubbles and it smells like overripe fruit and with my hands and much less work than actual child-bearing, I have fostered a life. Sure, he will never say “Mom” and he will never walk, but I made life! What the fuck!

So of course, I feel some deep level of responsibility to my starter, since he didn’t ask for life, I simply demanded a life of him. But being just flour and water, nobody really understands this responsibility to my sourdough baby. I once gave some starter to my partner, because he said he wanted to start making bread again. Being that I discard eighty-percent of my starter every day with feeding, it didn’t seem like a problem to toss some his way. But my partner didn’t keep up with feeding, and the portion I had given him was dead within two weeks. I know that the portion of the starter would have rotted in the garbage can next to last night’s chicken had he not asked for it, but I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt anyway. But then, he didn’t get it. It wasn’t really his.

There is a very bizarre intimacy between my starter and I (I know I sound really lonely — I hang out with people too! I swear!). This intimacy becomes more complex with the actual bread-making, and this is where I see my partner’s original idyllic bread forays from an entirely new perspective.

It is fun to make bread for the people you love, and if you happen to have someone you love who doesn’t love you back, a warm loaf of sourdough will almost definitely get you laid. But that isn’t my bread’s raison-d’être. I’m enchanted by the way the dough changes characteristics from step to step. I love the way one dough is never quite like the last, because it is ten degrees hotter or I accidentally used too much water or I let the it rest for an hour more. I love the directives in the recipe, the constant reminders that the dough is alive and needs to rest when it becomes too tense. Every bread-bake brings a new set of happenstance, and I’m fall more madly in love with its fickle existence with each loaf. I love the way the happenstance forces me to be present. Its almost like yoga, only way cheaper. But those moments, when you’re really working the dough — they are reason alone to make bread. Even if you never get a bite of the final product, the unique rapport of coaxing life into the dough, tension, air, space, in such a private way is really what bread making is about. It is quiet, it is difficult to explain. Even when someone is in the room when I’m shaping, they aren’t really there. They aren’t present in that moment. It is a romantic moment, the starting point of the “breaking bread” metaphor. But I find that bread-baking is transformative and intimate in the solidarity it demands. “Let the dough rest,” it says. And I do. We rest.

–NG