Beer Bread (simple to make! Eventually.)

(Originally appeared in the ENJ)
“You said you weren’t going to drink beer again.” DW stands with her head cocked to one side, her good eye jumping about as agitation builds.

“I’m not drinking beer.” I grumble. “Beer is disgusting.” I continue to eye the array of bottles on the rack in Gettysburg’s remodeled Giant supermarket where a beer garden replaces the old coffee shop, much to DW’s disgust. She used to enjoy a hot cuppa on our way home from shopping there.

“Then why are you looking at beer?” Her eye is now spastic in its jittering.

“I got a recipe for beer bread.”

She sighs. She used to think I was crazy, as my interests would jump from photography, to fish keeping, to gardening, to leather crafting, to… well, whatever caught my attention. Her eventual acceptance that I am crazy makes life simpler. That I tend to rein in my sudden enthusiasms, I’m only a year and some months from turning 60 (gods, how did that happen?), has also made her life easier as I’ve gotten practical in what I take interest in. Gardening has the potential to feed us, someday. Archery (now that I’ve settled into the type of shooting I enjoy) gets me out from under foot as I go off to watch over the IWLA kids a couple times a month during warm weather. Fermenting sugars into alcohol keeps me out of bars. Bread building fills the house with mouth-watering fragrances and tempts us to eat a food best gifted to others, neither of us needing the weight we tend to put on when I’m caught up in a bread making frenzy. (The current frenzy has run for several months and shows no sign of abating.)

“Beer bread? I hate beer. But go ahead.” Another long sigh. Turns out she hates beer bread made with dark, full flavored stout too. Nor is she wild over the wine bread I made a few days later.

Ever since my decision to sit among the pagans and listen to their philosophies I’ve been finding the universe opening door upon door upon door to lead me ever farther from the beaten path. What I have recently discovered as I step through these doors are rooms I’ve been in before, only now I’m seeing them from a different perspective.

Yes, beer is disgusting. During the ten-year inebriation, I drank a minimum of 3,600 bottles of beer and thought all but maybe a dozen of them disgusting. As I wasn’t chasing their flavor, I didn’t see the people around me who were. Now that I’m looking for shortcuts in bread building, (beer is a great shortcut for adding flavor to bread) I’m finding beer aficionados stepping up with suggestions of what they would like to see in bread I build. (And surprise! I’m not so far off the beaten path. There are more than a few local bread builders ahead of me.)

One home brewer (working at Gateway Liquor store outside of Thurmont), after sampling bread I made using a Polish beer he’d suggested, got so enthused he now wants to make beer for my bread! A customer standing at the counter asked if she could taste the bread. Eyes wide, she allowed the bread had to be on her table next Christmas.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share this recipe would you?”

I happily turned her frown to a delighted smile when I told her I’d found the recipe online and would print out a couple copies for her. (Should she not find time to make the bread herself I’d happily build as much bread as she needs for her seasonal feast. And why not? Her son works in that store, and like everyone else I’ve met there, has begun to suggest other forms/carriers of alcohol I might try in future bread.)

Not long after the Mad One tells me I should consider building bread professionally, Cousin Luke informs me one of his high school friends will be attending our next weekend feasting.

“Jack, he used to have a bakery.”

I find myself sitting with a once-upon-a-time baker as he finishes a plate of Paleo chicken with which the Mad One dazzled us. He uses a chunk of ciabatta I’d built (it’s the Mad One’s bread of choice if I give her a choice) to mop up the sauce. We’ve talked about food and wine, his bakery and why he isn’t baking for a living (no money in it). He mentions working part-time for a bakery/pizzeria in Biglerville. He’s cleaned his plate of sauce, the ciabatta no longer flavored with anything but my effort to give it life.

“What do you think of the bread?”

He studies it briefly. Takes a bite, chews and swallows. “This is good bread. Did you refrigerate the dough?”

I’m impressed. I had retarded the ferment overnight in the fridge.

“How can I improve it?”

The universe opens another door.

The baker, younger than I, clean-cut, soft-spoken, apparently a good Xian (possibly even a Christian, though I’d not go that far on such a short time with him) is about as opposite me as one can get. Yet we share a passion that allows us to consider the other favorably. He’s read most of the bread building books I have and a few I haven’t. He’s worked with master bakers in Phillie, toured the bakeries of Europe and has built a wood-fired oven in his backyard. (He seemed pleased that I recognized the design and took to urging me to bring him dough we can ready for the oven as he seldom has time to build bread these days.)

We got to talking about where I might go with this interest in crafting bread. He suggested I consider a commercial venture. I allowed the idea appeals to me, but I don’t want to make pig food.

“What you call pig food is bread made from mixes and shaped to look like artisan bread. It has additives to give it shelf life. The few bakeries in your area also use mixes, as far as I can tell from the breads I’ve had of them. What you make is NOT pig food. You need to learn the bakers’ percentages and make ten or so loaves at a time so the handling and shaping becomes easy. You have a passion for this. I can teach you the rest.”

“What do I do with ten loaves of bread?”

“What do you do with the two or three loaves you make now?”

“Hmmm… I guess I can find ten people to gift bread to?”

“There you go.” He smiles. “It isn’t the finished bread we’re concerned with. It’s the making, the building, the constantly striving for better bread. Isn’t it?”

Yes. Yes it is. Now, I have to learn to create and keep a sourdough starter.

Adding a bottle of beer is so much easier. Which reminds me! I have three beer doughs ready for the oven and an olive oil bread to start building. And a cake. Honey cake! Gods, the frenzy be upon me!

In Spite of Allergies!

( Originally appeared in the ENJ)

Twenty-eight years ago, it entered my head that I should sober up and get on with living. The hangovers had stretched from a few hours into days and what was left of my mind stubbornly refused to let me suicide by any means quicker than drinking myself to death. With a sigh of resignation, I looked about for something to live for. Having spent the past twelve years as a drunk, I hadn’t much recent experience outside of that scene so I considered the time before alcohol. The twelve years of schooling offered little beyond frustration and anger so I jumped beyond them to my preschool years. What in those dim memories could be conjured to inspire a new run at life?

The fragrance of Mom’s homemade bread filled my head. My mouth watered. I knew I had a starting point. Not a reason to live, but a goal to focus on while I rebuilt a life mostly wasted at that time. I would attempt to recreate the white bread Mom had enchanted a five year old with. (Years later I would realize the god Yeast, has long influenced my life. First, as a major facilitator of bread, then the creator of alcohol, and back to bread again.)

I had a mission. Decades later, I have not built Mom’s bread. It eventually penetrated my addled pate, via a dozen bread books covering all aspects of bread from grain fields to glazes, that a couple of things were no longer available to me. Whatever flour Mom had used, the wheat for it is no longer grown. The milk certainly isn’t the same. (Cream graced the upper portion of the bottles she poured the sweet liquid from, nothing like the thin, chalky joke called “whole milk” today.) Perhaps even the yeast strains had been tweaked. And the butter I use was, in her kitchen, some brand of long forgotten margarine.

Disasters (in my eyes) followed me from bread book to bread book. I finally gave up on Mom’s bread and turned to artisan breads at librarian Sue’s suggestion. Which was a leap of frustration more than of faith. Most people who attempt bread building can make an acceptable white bread. Though many home bakers I’ve talked to pale at the thought of working with wet, gooey dough that can take days to build and often flops at the moment before entering an oven. Sue, being on a bread-building path herself, took to sharing her efforts and inspired me to reconsider just what I wanted from bread.

For ten years, I played with recipes, getting close to something I actually liked, though each loaf was found lacking in one quality or another. Then in October of this year, everything came together. Breads began to turn out close to perfection. Especially breads I don’t like, but others find delightful. It seemed I could do nothing wrong even when I screwed up a recipe or tweaked it by switching flours, mixed building methods because of scheduling, or (even more likely to end badly) adjusted ingredient amounts and time tables to get what I wanted when I wanted it! I had reached a wall and passed through it, or over it.

The Mad One has been my harshest, most earnest critic. No other individual has sampled more of the breads I’ve built, nor urged me onward, nor chastised me more often. The last breads I presented to her eager, but skeptical eyes, were at once tore into chunks to be devoured alone, dipped in some sauce, swiped through a gravy, eaten with cheese, savored with sips of wine.

Staring at me over a handful of bread, she allowed, “This is real bread. All the breads you have brought me these last weeks have been real bread. Now you have to decide. Are you going to continue playing or are you going to get serious and take the next step?”

I stare back at her. The next step is commercial of course. I considered the breads good enough, but wondered if it was ego or fact. Fact, according to the Mad One.

“Stop experimenting and focus on several breads, each for a different purpose. Perfect them so you can make them with little effort. You’ve made some good cake, add another desert or two and you have the basis of a business. Emmitsburg is the wrong town for such a business though. You will have to move. Sophia would be a good place to open a bakery. My sister says the bread there is horrible now. The old ways of doing things are being lost to the European Union.”

I don’t see myself in Bulgaria, but I never saw artisan breads on the horizon, or the Mad One either. Nor did I see a developing wheat allergy that leaves me groggy, sinuses clogged, eyes burning and cramps in the intestines after only a few mouthfuls of bread.

I’ve new goals I struggle toward. Making an income from bread is not one of them. (I’ve stood on a farm and watched tons of commercial artisan breads be unwrapped, ground and fed to pigs and cows. Why would I put my heart and energy into making pig food?) No, I’ll work at perfecting the recipes I’ve gotten good at and gift them to people I know will appreciate them.

I would like to try building breads in a kitchen with commercial equipment someday, before the allergy gets so bad I have to remove myself from a floury environment. (Perhaps I’ll even offer them at some future bake sale.) Gods, I hope the Mad One understands. I’ve seen her challenge dragons and the dragons back down! Maybe I can teach her to make bread, if she hangs around another twenty-eight years?

There is a goal worth working toward. I now have flour from Europe to use in the recipes the Mad One and I favor most. She tells me she has no talent for bread building, just a passion for eating it. That’s all I started with, a passion so great I set aside much else I could have more profitably pursued. She wants me to teach her so she can teach her mom, who (of course) makes the best breads in the Mad One’s life. But not like the ones I build.

Sadly, the Mad One’s mom will not always be there to build such memorable breads. The Mad One, stubborn as she can be, will learn the recipes and techniques from me so she can go home and learn more from her mother. Knowing I’ve passed something valuable on to someone else seems the best way for me to proceed. Perhaps someone not on the Mad One’s horizon will learn bread building from her.