Stones for Bread (3 page)

I shape the dough, all of these boules. The plain Wild Rise sourdough, though nothing about it can be considered plain—it’s simply unadorned to spotlight the complex flavors—is left to proof in
bannetons
, the coiled willow of the basket leaving its distinctive pattern on the crust even after baking. The dark, earthy Farmhouse
miche
is freestanding boule, nearly four pounds, formed and left on linen
couches
. I chop ripe pears and knead those into the third dough, along with cardamom and fresh ginger, to make the Spiced Anjou. Tomorrow I’ll add a candied pear slice to the top, to bake into the crust—Xavier’s idea. And finally the Sweet
Chèvre
, with its sharp goat cheese and fig filling.

It’s nearly nine. Some dough goes into the cooler. Some I cover with plastic wrap and leave on the table. Then I go upstairs to the apartment above the bakehouse, eat an apple and shower, and set my alarm for four thirty in the morning.

Two

They bake together, my mother and grandmother, performing the dance of
brot
without hesitation, their bodies confident with a sense of space I’ll never have. I watch, not because they don’t want to include me, but because I’m fascinated by their movements. Even from behind, their kinship is clear. They share a shape—open hips, thick legs, narrow shoulders—Oma’s body the shorter and more compact of the two, like a shadow when the sun is just beyond noon. Their hair is the same brown, shimmery with the undertones of fire, Oma’s with streaks of soot gray where her youth has burned away. When I draw them up into my mind, it’s always their backs I see first, and I must will them to turn around to remember their faces.

I look nothing like them.

I’m all points to their curves, nose, chin, elbows, ribs. I ask about it, and my mother tells me I favor Daddy’s side. Later we sit together and flip through a photo album, the plastic pages squawking, and
she touches the face of a black-and-white woman with pale hair, long cheeks, and downturned eyes.
Your father’s Aunt Elinor
. She’s plain and pointy and never married. I have to admit I resemble her more than not, and wonder if that’s how they see me, the pointy girl destined to become an even thornier spinster.

Oma takes me on her lap and tells me of Germany, good Lutheran tales because my father is Irish and Catholic and she believes I learn nothing of the things I should. She tickles my armpits and whispers other stories from
Der Struwwelpeter
. My mother tries to intervene but she’s shushed and waved away.
Du machst aus einer Mücke einen Elefanten!
, Oma tells her, gravel in her voice. You’re making an elephant out of a mosquito. But my mother knows I’ll have nightmares of thumb-sucking boys with sheared-off fingers and a giant Santa Claus drowning me in ink.

But then Oma tells me of bread, of the six hundred kinds made throughout her homeland, white and gray and black in color. Loaves heavy with pumpkin seeds. Pumpernickel. Rye. All with long, dense names like
Sonnenblumenkernbrot
and
Roggenmischbrot
. Each word is music to her. She has never eaten tinned bread bagged in plastic with a little twist tie, a pride she wears all over.
It matters
, she tells me.
Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing
.

Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.

I come into the bakeshop at five in the morning, a film of coffee and toothpaste on my tongue. Xavier, as steady as time, loads bread into the oven with a long-handled peel. The first loaves of the day. The rest proof on the tables, one final rise, one last chance for the Saccharomycetales to feast before entering the fiery furnace. They aren’t the first domesticated creatures to be sacrificed for the stomachs of their masters, but perhaps the only ones to have their
immortality stolen from them. As individuals, yeasts eventually die, but the colony can live forever, mother cells budding daughter cells into eternity.

Xavier wears swimming trunks and a sleeveless tank shirt, the heat from the oven washing over his skin. Perspiration shines on his bald head and catches in the hair of his long, fibrous arms. I recall the photos I’ve seen of Parisian
boulangers
, clad only in thin, white cotton shorts, baker’s lames in their teeth.

“’Morning, Zave,” I say.

He nods. “I sliced and sugared the pears for you.”

“I would have done it.”

“I know,” he says, and then motions to the tables. “Beautiful work.”

I would love him, I think, if he were forty years younger, or I forty older. He once hugged a still-warm miche to his chest, pressed his cheek to it when he thought no one would see him, and right then I read our kindredness on his face. I understand now why some believe in reincarnation, two people learning one another over and over into infinity, retaining pieces in the persistence of memory so they will recognize something of the other when they meet again. Xavier peers through me like glass.

My first instinct when seeing the domes of yellow-white dough is, always, to put my hands on it. The taut skin of unbaked bread, the puffiness pressed up just beneath the surface. It’s a woman’s stomach, swollen with maturity, beautiful in its generosity. As a child I would poke my finger into it, deeper and deeper until the dough no longer sprung back but created a divot in the otherwise perfect mound. “Look, Mama, a belly button.”

“They’re scars,” she’d tell me. “Everyone begins life with a scar.”

She knew.

And now Xavier scores the dough and it opens in gaping, bloodless wounds. The crust will bake differently in those places—rougher, thinner, blistery. More scars.

This is my body, broken for you
.

When Wild Rise first opened, I did all the bread making myself. I brought Gretchen on when it became clear I couldn’t keep up with the demand and thought she would make the things I didn’t like to do—the enriched breads, the sandwich loaves, cinnamon buns, breadsticks. For five months I woke at two a.m., shuffling downstairs with the grit of sleep in my eyes. I fell into bed by eight, though by the time the lunch crowd left I dreamt of curling beneath the blankets. But the quality of the bread suffered. I had to hire someone, and after several weeks of help-wanted advertisements in the local classified section of the
Green Mountain Sentinel
, and several applicants I wouldn’t trust to pour a bowl of cornflakes, let alone work in my bakehouse, I found Xavier. Or he found me. He’d owned a bakery in New Hampshire, started in the seventies and built to three locations, his bread in supermarkets across the state. He retired here, to Vermont, and gave the business to his children, but the lure of dough can’t be buried with golf games and winters in Tampa. “I’m seventy-one,” he told me when I mentioned the ungodly hours. “I don’t sleep anyway.”

Three years later, I still couldn’t guess his age if I did not know it.

We pull loaves from the oven, Xavier shoveling them onto the peel, me catching them in the baskets and setting them on the racks. The air snaps with cooling crust, a symphony of dried twigs crunching beneath my feet, of cracking knuckles, of Rice Krispies. I’m home within that sound.

I keep notations, like my mother. She had notebook after notebook of trials and errors, all written in her perfect penmanship on quad-ruled pages, a square for each letter to nest in. My journal is a thick black hardcover with unlined pages. Like her, I’m a technician, a statistician, copiously documenting slight variations in texture, color, taste. I’m a chemist. A quarter cup of rye flour added to the white wheat gives a sweeter flavor. A half teaspoon more salt and 78 percent
hydration of the dough result in those coveted large, irregular rooms in the crumb. Mastering formulas, not recipes, in the quest for the perfect loaf. Xavier tells me not to bother. He doesn’t believe in perfection. “Forget the ingredients. Forget the environment.
You
are different each day. You can’t replicate yourself. Your hands are stronger, or weaker. Your mind thinks different thoughts while kneading. Life is all over you, changing you. All that goes into the making comes out in the bread. It won’t be the same from one batch to the next. Not ever.”

“It’ll be close, though.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

He’s the artist. He makes me brave enough to try. With his encouragement, I’ve focused on the creativity of bread, writing my own recipes, exploring nontraditional flavors and shapes. Not all of them turn out well, but he tastes my failures with me, with layers of warm butter.

Xavier fills the oven again. I scrawl a few notations in the corner of my journal while his back is turned, twist a pencil into my hair, and after adding cinnamon and star anise to the bowl, plunge my hands into the wet flour mixture. Pans clatter, and I see him stirring brown sugar on the stove. The sauce for the sticky buns. “I would have taken care of that,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “But your hands are a mess.”

“Tee’s gonna throw a fit when she finds out you used her pots.”

“Only if someone tells her.”

I laugh. “I don’t have to. She’ll know anyway. She has some sort of psychic chef sense.”

“We’ll see about that. I’ll turn the handle to point exactly where she left it.”

“Wager on it?”

“Oh, I’m not a betting man,” he says, and winks because we both know I’m right and he’ll lose.

Yes, kindred.

Liesl’s Orange Chai Boule

Makes one loaf

L
IESL
’
S NOTES
:

This bread uses commercial yeast, but it’s an excellent introduction to cold fermentation, a way to extract more flavor from the bread by slowing the fermentation process. It’s delicious toasted with cream cheese for a little bit of sweetness.

I
NGREDIENTS
:

360g (3 cups) unbleached bread flour, organic if possible

6g (1 teaspoon) finely ground sea salt

5g (1 teaspoon) instant yeast

120g (½ cup) fresh-squeezed orange juice

140g (½ cup) plus 2 tablespoons cold water

10g (1 teaspoon) orange zest

½ teaspoon ground star anise

½ teaspoon ground fennel seed

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground allspice

⅛ teaspoon ground cardamom

85g (¼ cup) honey

E
QUIPMENT
:

mixing bowl

wooden spoon

stand mixer with dough hook (optional)

olive oil or nonstick cooking spray

glass or ceramic bowl

cornmeal

pizza peel or parchment paper

plastic wrap

broiler pan

pizza stone or baking tiles

serrated knife or razor

baking thermometer (optional)

D
O
A
HEAD

Combine all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl. Use a large wooden spoon and stir for 1 minute, until well blended; the dough should form a coarse, shaggy ball.

If using an electric stand mixer, switch to the dough hook and mix on medium-low speed for 2 minutes. The dough should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not to the sides. Or knead by hand for about 2 minutes, adjusting with flour or water as needed. The dough should be smooth and soft but not sticky.

Use olive oil to lightly coat the inside of a clean bowl. Transfer the dough to this bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight or up to 4 days.

O
N
B
AKING
D
AY

Remove the dough from the refrigerator about 2 or 3 hours before you plan to bake. Gently transfer it to a lightly floured work surface, taking care to degas it as little as possible. To form a boule, hold the dough in your hands and sprinkle with more flour so it doesn’t stick to your hands. Stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides, rotating it as you go. When it’s correctly shaped, the ball will be smooth and cohesive. This should take less than a minute to accomplish. Generously sprinkle cornmeal on a pizza peel or sheet of parchment paper. Lightly coat the plastic wrap with olive oil or nonstick cooking spray, loosely cover the dough, and proof at room
temperature for about 2 hours, until increased to one and a half times its original size.

About 45 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or as high as it will go. On the lower shelf, put the empty broiler pan. Position the pizza stone on the shelf above.

Just prior to baking, score the dough ½ inch deep with a serrated knife or razor. Transfer the dough to the oven, pour 1 cup of hot water into the steam pan, then lower the oven temperature to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bake for 25 to 35 minutes, until the crust is a rich golden brown, the loaf sounds hollow when thumped, and the internal temperature registers about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in the center, using a baking thermometer. For a crisper crust, turn off the oven and leave the bread in for another 5 minutes before removing.

Cool the bread for at least 45 minutes before slicing or serving.