Bread: Staff of Life? Or Stuff of Hips?

Becky asked for my cheese bread recipe and that got me thinking about the role of bread in our lives, esp. in my own. 

I started baking bread as a teenager for a number of reasons. I was coming of age at the end of the back-to-the-land/Mother Earth News era for one.  And I knew some Mormons.  Plus I really liked bread.  As a little girl, I would beg my mother to buy the frozen bread dough at the Winn Dixie to bake for our family.

When I started my own family, bread became symbolic of the kind of life I wanted. Time for it, for instance.  It was now the eighties, decade of the Super-Mom, and I was pretty sure I wanted none of it. Slowing down enough to knead bread and wait for it to rise was an important component of the life I hoped to create for my family. As was thoughtfulness about ingredients, and the happiness that came from cutting into a still-warm loaf and slathering the slice with Better Butter. Around that time, I read Laurel’s Kitchen – a classic vegetarian cookbook that elevated bread to the main ingredient of a healthy diet and a happy home.

It was also the age of the high-carbohydrate diet. We were supposed to eat less fat, less protein and more carbs, and I was all over it. Excess protein was leaching calcium from our bones, and farm animals were eating precious grain that could be feeding the hungry (and my family) much more efficiently. Again, healthy whole-grain bread was the ticket. 

And there was the attractive multicultural history - pizza in Italy, nan in India, matzo,tortillas, pita, pumpernickel, hamburger buns!  Bread was what brought us together, what we broke at the table, what nourished us and connected us to one another. Bread = World Peace.  Or at least my little part as a late cold-war era mom of four babies with missiles pointed at them - and at just about every other mother's child. I was pretty serious about this.

Fast forward a little over a decade and enter the low-carb diet.  I honestly have never given it much thought since its intent seemed to be weight-loss over health, environmental concerns, animal welfare, or family (and world) unity.  But as my aging hips spread along with those of nearly everyone else in our country, I have to wonder how much can be attributed to my fixation with bread.

In my little world, I am kind of famous for bread (in a fifteen minutes of fame spread over 30 years way).  I have saved many a boring or unfamiliar or disappointingly vegetarian meal with homemade bread (because homemade bread is miraculous that way). And I have often baked and served bread sort of publicly – at various functions, etc.  Most recently, I have taught bread-baking and used one of my family’s favorite recipes at the “Breakfast Brigade” and for “Dorothy’s Café.”  People really appreciate the delicious soup, the local fruit, the warm, boiled eggs, but they adore the bread. This hyper-driven bread baking has given me the undeserved reputation of being a good cook, and I’ve enjoyed that quite a bit.

But there are the hips, augmented by my recent need for comfort and my vegetarian tendency to equate bread with Grandma’s chicken soup.  I eat a lot of it, especially when under stress. I am thinking it is time to take Michael Pollan’s advice and “eat food, not too much, mostly plants."  In other words, moderation.  So for now, one piece of bread each day.  It’s not locavorian anyway, being made of wheat.  But if it's going to be just one slice, it’s going to be homemade – or bakery-baked at least.

Becky, here is the bread recipe. Let me know how it turns out:

Basic Wheat Bread (aka Breakfast Brigade Bread)

The recipe below will yield four 9x5 loaves.   If you want to be fancy – and possibly famous (locally anyway) - roll out the dough after you divide it and sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and raisins, or chives, or rosemary, or garlic butter, or jam, or grated cheese.  Roll it like a jelly roll into a loaf.  You’ll get the familiar raisin-bread-swirl in the middle.  It’s good. 

Ingredients:

5 cups whole wheat flour

4-5 cups white flour

4 Tbsp. fast-acting yeast

¼ cup honey

2 Tbsp. salt

1 qt. warm tap water

In a large bowl, combine the wheat flour with yeast and salt.  In a second bowl, combine water with honey. Add liquid to flour mixture and stir with whisk. Add white flour, a cup at a time, stirring well after each addition until dough is soft but leaves the sides of the bowl clean. Turn onto floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic (about 10 minutes).  Divide into fourths, shape into loaves (see additions above) and place in well-greased loaf pans. Let rise until double (in my preheated oven, heated to 170 then turned off, this takes only about a half hour).  When risen, pre-heat oven to 350 and bake for about 30 minutes till bottoms are light brown. Let cool slightly before slicing.

Comments

[Michele]

Ooh, I'll have to try that recipe. Thanks for that post. I have been using a recipe that my friend, Brenda, turned me onto. It can be found here:
http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=5716.msg77100
It's called "Outrageously Easy Big Bread."

I love baking bread and because it's something I made I try not to worry about the whole carb thing. All things in moderation, right? With a big slop of creamy butter.

[Mary]

Thank you so much! I recently baked bread for Dorothy's cafe and was wondering how on earth I was going to resist calling someone for the recipe! The bread certainly brightened up a rainy Sunday afternoon...