Baking Bread

I want to keep posting. I just don’t do it. I have plenty of stories and I often think about how I might write them, but then I stall, and before long it seems like old news. So that loaf from the other day came out of nowhere; it was my attempt to jumpstart. I wanted to post something without writing anything, like a cannonball into cold water, but now it’s time to try swimming.

Cooking has been a part of my life in Spain, the produce is fresh and cheap, I have a (meagerly) stocked kitchen, and both time and interest. With long to-do lists and the general busyness back home, investing time in cooking didn’t make much sense. Now, I think of it as a creative hobby. Some paint, others write—but I get to eat my work. From an economical perspective, baking bread doesn’t actually save me any dough when it’s 1.20 € at the Mercadona for three French loaves, but I’m having fun, and I’m learning something useful.

Trying a new dish is always a little intimidating as recipes, even simple ones, are filled with all kinds of jargon that cooking newbies like me just don’t understand. Breads moreso. You’ve gone beyond cutting, mixing and heating. Now you’ve got little living buggers to feed and keep warm just so they raise your dough. No amount of reading will clarify the difference between a sticky, tacky, firm, very wet, or just-so dough. Kneading seems a little abstract as well. What could be easily demonstrated just doesn’t work in text.

With time, my resolve conquered doubt and I set out to try what seemed to be a very simple and straightforward recipe. Consulting my dictionary, I needed levadura, yeast. The Mercadona stocked little black boxes next to the flour sacks that were clearly labeled levadura en polvo above an image of muffins. It must mean like smashed yeast or something, I thought. Yeast dust. Seems right.

But, my bread didn’t rise. I had come to check on it between classes (remember I live right across the street from my school) and I’m theorizing: hmm, it is pretty cold in the apartment, maybe leaving it out in the sun will help? Still nothing. Then I’m wondering about the front of that little box, do you even make muffins with yeast? I’m reading the instructions on the back more carefully and the word química worries me. Wordreference confirms my suspicion, levadura en polvo=baking powder.

So this thing’s not going to rise. If I were making a quick bread from the start I could have put it in the oven right after mixing, but it’s too late now. Not wanting to waste the dough, I’m thinking: keep it basic, I have wet flour and I want bread. I need to make it hot. I heat up a skillet and make what turns out to be pretty decent fry bread. Something like Indian naan. So far, even the big kitchen goof ups have been edible.

In the following weeks, realizing I had baking powder on hand, I made a couple of loaves of beer bread. Quick breads turned out to be both easy and tasty, not a bad combination. My roommates at least approved, and at one of our dinner parties I got the observant comment “Mmm, you can really taste the beer in here.” But I still hadn’t had a good yeast bread.


Then I went to Barcelona. (This is supposed to have something to do with Spain after all, and it does, kind of.) I had planned to meet a friend from Sevilla for a long weekend we had at the beginning of December. I found a small, highly rated place to stay on hostelbooker.com and was set for a fun weekend.

The hostel was small, about 20 people, with the striking majority coming from Australia. The receptionist immediately responded to me in English despite my Spanish greeting, which seemed odd to me at the time. I had had the same experience in Granada, surrounded by an island of English speakers in the midst of a Spanish-speaking city. I later accounted for this peculiarity in the community kitchen. The others had also picked this hostel for it's high ratings on hostelbooker. I guess not too many Spaniards log onto this English website when looking for travel lodging.

Nonetheless, it was a good group of young, twenty-somethings and being a small place as it was, we all naturally spoke and got to know each other. Some were traveling for weeks, some for months, while others were taking a weekend away from a study abroad university and two girls were language assistants in Austria just as I am in Spain. And then there was the seemingly out-of-place, portly, white-haired man. He was always mixing something up in the kitchen, a little bit in his own world, but just as content as could be. When he found I’d studied nutrition, he had all kinds of questions and advice for me. He believed young people today don’t eat as much fish as they should, and described what a simple and wonderful dish can be found in lentils and rice. He wanted to know whether I thought wine was healthy. He explained that he enjoyed being around young people, that he had a couple days off from work and had come to Barcelona (from France) just to cook and walk around the city. He wouldn’t be joining the crew leaving for the bars, (around 11:30 in Barcelona) he was just enjoying a little break the ordinary.

And the young people loved him. It was probably his always upbeat, calm demeanor. The fact that he had chosen to stay in a dorm with a bunch of kids clearly speaks to his character. Or, it could be that he made and shared bread everyday. Good bread. Crispy crust, soft crumb, he pulled a beautiful loaf out of the oven every afternoon. There’s really nothing to it, he would say. "Just flour and a little yeast with a bit of salt. And water of course." Nothing complicated about it. Of course everyone loved free, fresh bread from the old French guy. But I wanted him to show me how.

And he happily obliged. It’s so simple really. Add enough water to make the flour wet, let it rise for a long time, overnight is good, and bake it until done. Can’t argue with that. There wasn’t one concrete instruction, but watching him work, feeling the temperature of the water and seeing how he shaped the loaf filled the gaps left by even self-described “idiot-proof” recipes. He explained he got the minimalist idea from New York Times’ Mark Bittman.

He was right. It can be pretty easy to make good bread. It’s also plenty easy to mess one up, as I did immediately after baking that beauty by storing it in plastic. The moist crumb and the crisp crust got too friendly leaving the whole thing soggy and uninspiring.