Hard work

Bread is hard work. I don't care what all those people out there say to the contrary, there's no such thing as an "easy" bread. I'm not talking about banana breads and Irish soda breads here, no no. I'm talking about yeast breads, real breads, the breads with varying crumbs and flavors and all those brief-lived organisms growing inside, the breads with crusts and crunch and chew. Now, if you have a stand-mixer that does all your kneading for you, great, that might make things much easier. I don't have an electric mixer though, and so do all my kneading by hand...yet another factor which may contribute to the feeling that making bread can often be a beastly endeavor. Bread is tough! Of course, you can argue with me. After all, I don't think I argue with people enough."I can make a no-knead, slow-cooker based bread that's super easy!" you shout at me from across the ether. I'll respond though, with something along the lines of "Even so, you still need time and understanding of the elements, need to know how long the dough should sit, what it should look like after a few hours, know that the longer you let that yeast sit the better the flavor...and well, none of those things are really easy things." I'm such a downer. 

If you want me to concede a bit, I"ll admit that there are varying levels of difficulty in bread-making, from easier to difficult...but I still certainly don't think there's an "easy" yeast-bread level that stands on its own. For example, any yeast bread you can make in a day is an "easier" bread in my book. You can make challah in a day, and get away with just 2 proofs for a decent bread. Even so, you still have to give a couple of hours for rising and know what is enough kneading and what is over-kneading, how much flour is too much, so on and so forth. Also, the more proofs the better the flavor of the challah. Subsequently, I don't think I'm too off in saying that with yeast breads, plenty of hours will pass before you have a final product that's the best it can be. 

Don't get me wrong. Baking bread at home is a wonderful experience, and more people should do it. I don't want to deter anyone by saying it's difficult, I'm just saying you should embrace the challenge and appreciate the fact that handmade bread is an art. You can feel safe with the knowledge that the more you bake bread, the easier it will be to produce a more consistent loaf. Just don't start off thinking it's cake and that the first thing you pull out of your oven will be perfect. Like many good things, bread-making is rife with trial-and-error, and you might need time to work out the kinks. Perhaps it's one of those things where if you don't have the natural talent, you'll need a great deal of practice before ever coming close to being an expert. I'm just saying, bread is tough, man, and good bread is even tougher.  If you want good bread, you'll most likely need to spend time on figuring out how ingredients work together, how yeast activity changes with temperature and moisture, how time is needed to develop flavors, all which will guide you towards understanding and accepting the fact that almost every loaf of bread baked at home might be different from the last, simply because all these conditions vary depending on the day and weather and mood. 

Anyways, I think the difficulty of bread-making is an appropriate metaphor for my generalizations these days. Basic things that are difficult to do well. Since the past two days of endless rain and sudden onslaught of beautiful weather have made the ambiance ripe for gloomy contemplation and emerging revelation, it's no surprise that after walking through the neighborhood and seeing some "For Sale" signs, my enjoyment of the weather was tempered by the thought that life is just so damn hard. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but nope, life's difficulty still shocks me. 

More to the point is that, at my age, I'm a little sad to realize that I don't have enough money in my bank account right now to even buy a car, much less put a down-payment down on a house. A determinate career is far away as well, and even my personal relationships have room for so much improvement, for more honesty and less mystery. You'd think that all of these things were basic things, ownership of shelter, relationships....but no. For me, they're so difficult to achieve or even bring close to perfect (kind of like how bread is such a basic thing, but so difficult to make perfect). Now, I don't know if perfection is a realistic end-goal, but all I mean by perfection is contentment, something that doesn't cause anxiety or stress. Acquiring material possessions, like a house, seems like a nearly insurmountable task at this point in time, and in terms of relationships, only time will tell. Does the ticking of time inevitably bring about the decision to settle for less, to reach that contentment? I often wonder if there are other life paths I've missed that would have put me closer to achieving such things without the trickle of "settling" running so close to the  main river. Regrets don't contribute much, but you can always wonder, right? So long as you factor in the losses that would occur if you truly did go back. 

So bread-making and life mirror each other in difficulty, but there is a big difference. The difficulty with life might never change, in fact, it may increase. While it's logical to assume that the more you bake bread, the better you'll get at it, with life? Is there such a thing as getting better at living?

Here is a rustic rye bread, that I suppose has the texture of a french bread - a chewy yet airy and and fluffy, tight crumb, a crunchy medium thick crust - albeit with a pleasant rye flavor. Note that for the first time ever, I've made bread using a poolish, or a starter of sorts, which is meant to contribute to the overall flavor of the bread. I only let my poolish sit for about 6 hours, which is a short amount of time for a poolish, so while the flavor is improved, it probably could be further developed. Let the yeast work for a little longer and let off a little more gas, if you know what I mean. Consequently, it might be worth trying this recipe with a poolish that's allowed to sit overnight, or for at least 12 hours. Of course, this isn't a sourdough starter or anything, meaning I use active dry yeast instead of letting the wild yeast grow and ferment, but the weather's really been too cold to have at a sourdough starter, much less ferment anything. Either way, for a novice, this bread comes out really well, and is fantastic with some aged ham and spicy mustard, or some daal (my new favorite snack, haha). Bread success, I say, but who knows whether or not it's repeatable, we'll see.

In order to get that tight but airy crumb, be gentle with handling your dough. While my loaves had an airy crumb, I actually wanted a bread with a looser crumb or larger holes...so in a sense, while this bread turned out well, it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I was going for something more baguette-like in texture, what I got was softer. I suppose the tight, airy crumb I baked means I may have manhandled the dough too much and or did too many iterations of the "stretch and fold" process - I did three - so I will probably only do 2 stretch-and-fold iterations next time. In the range of difficulty for this bread, I'd say it's on the moderately difficult side because you can make this bread in 1 day, so long as you start your poolish in the morning and plan on baking at night. I started my poolish around noon, and finished baking the loaves around 10 or 11 PM (yes, a very late dinner indeed). What's particularly difficult is the kneading. Because I did this by hand, I want to note that this dough is very sticky to work with at first and takes a long time to knead before the gluten is developed enough. It took me nearly an hour of kneading, but more like 30 minutes because I split the dough into two balls and kneaded each ball separately. You'll be tempted to keep adding flour to help decrease the stickiness, but I don't know what will happen to the bread texture if you add another cup of flour, so proceed with caution. In this case, I shied away from adding more flour, and just made sure to have a pastry scraper on hand and keep my board dusted with all-purpose flour. Once the dough became smooth and elastic from kneading, and was springy when I pushed on it, was when I stopped. I'm not sure it would've passed the windowpane test, but I'd say it was close.

Good luck! It may be difficult at first, but trust me, it's worth it. 

Rye Bread Rustica
2 large loaves

starter or poolish
1/2 C of rye flour
1/2 C of bread flour
1/3 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 C of warm water

rest of the dough
2/3 teaspoon active dry yeast
900 g (or 5-6 C) bread flour
400 g (or 2 C) water
2 teaspoons salt
1 C all-purpose flour, for kneading
1 TB caraway seeds

Mix together the poolish or starter ingredients and let sit at room temperature (or if it's cold outside, in a warm place) for 5-7 hours, until bubbly and you can kind of see the strands of gluten developing when you pour it. You can also set this poolish out overnight, just make sure to decrease the amount of active dry yeast you add the next day to the final dough. In my case, I let it sit for about 6 hours before I added the rest of the ingredients.

Mix in 4 cups of bread flour, water, and yeast into your starter, until a wet dough forms. Then add in the salt and the caraway seeds. The dough will be very sticky at this point but will still hold together - if you have a stand-mixer, this would be a good time to use it for kneading, but I don't have one, so I kneaded it out by hand. At first, it was so sticky and wet that I used a metal pastry scraper to knead the dough and scrape it up from the board while continually sprinkling in the remaining 1-2 cups of bread flour. Once it became more tacky and manageable, however, split the dough into two equal parts. It's easier to work with smaller portions than 1 huge portion, though, if you have big hands and lots of muscle, feel free to keep it as 1 large dough. Using all-purpose flour on the board to prevent sticking, knead each ball by hand until the dough is smooth and elastic. You can either use the windowpane test to see if the gluten is developed, or knead until the dough is springy and springs back when you push on it. Then place dough in 2 separate well-oiled bowls and let rise for an hour, until at least doubled in size. Once doubled in size, do the stretch-and fold process at every hour for 3 hours, gently though, to prevent air pockets inside the dough from popping. Then bake on high heat for 15 minutes, before lowering the heat and letting the bread finish off. In greater and perhaps clearer detail, here's what my schedule looked liked:

1. 12 PM > Put together your poolish and let sit in a warm place for at least 5 -6 hours. 

2. 6 PM > Add in the remaining ingredients and knead until gluten is developed.

3. 7 PM > Place dough in well oiled bowls, covered with plastic wrap, and let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

4. 8 PM > Switch to stretch and fold process. Using a spatula or your hands, gently fold the round of dough in half, rotate 90 degrees and fold in half again (should look like quarter of a circle, or a huge pizza slice). Pinch the sides together and gently pat back into the shape of a sphere. Place back into covered, oiled bowl and let rise for another hour.

5. 9 PM > Repeat the stretch and fold process.

6. 10 PM > Repeat the stretch and fold process. At 10:30 PM, preheat your oven to 465 degrees C. If you had a baking stone, let it preheat with your oven. If you don't have a baking stone, place a metal baking sheet upside down in the oven and have non-stick parchment paper on hand.

7. 11 PM > Remove the dough gently from the bowls and gently stretch and shape the dough into oblong shapes (like a loaf of bread). Place onto parchment paper. Using a sharp knife, slice 3-4 slices diagonally across the top of the bread. Slide the parchment paper with the dough onto the back of the hot baking sheet, and cover with an oven-proof lid, like one of those large aluminum roasting pans or a turkey-roaster lid. Bake the loaves, covered (this is to help develop the crust by trapping the moisture coming off from the bread and making steam*) for 15 to 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, remove the roasting lid, lower the heat to 375 degrees, and bake loaves uncovered for another 20 minutes, or until loaves are browned and sound hollow when tapped. 

Let the bread cool, uncovered. It's now ready to serve. *Note that instead of this method, you can also spray water into the hot oven to create steam, or have a pan with boiling water in the oven for the first 15 minutes.