If the run on flour at the grocery store can be trusted, baking bread was the go-to solution for bored Americans during the recent COVID-19 quarantine efforts. So far, I hadn’t jumped on that particular bandwagon (I have baked my weight in banana bread), but that ended this weekend.
I’ve been baking since my mom introduced me to the joy of making your own chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies when I was little. I still bake cookies and more recently have started making quickbreads like banana bread, or savory options like beer and soda bread.
But those quickbreads don’t use yeast — they rely on baking soda or powder and other elements to achieve a rise. I’ve never waded into true yeasted bread territory before.
For years, my mom has been making a tried and true peasant-style bread for family gatherings. This isn’t doughy Wonder Bread. It’s heavy and hearty and crusty and goes perfectly with soup or stew or even a roast.
The recipe Mom uses is from “The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking” by Brother Rick Curry — he calls it Brothers’ Bread.
“Bread baking has been a Jesuit tradition since the order was founded in 1534 by Ignatius Loyola, who begged bread for the poor,” according to the publisher of Curry’s book.
I’ve watched Mom make this bread I don’t know how many times. I thought, “How hard could it be?”
Ha!
I got the recipe and started out on my own. I mixed, as the recipe says, 2 1/4 cups of warm water with 1 tablespoon active dry yeast until dissolved. Then I mixed in one tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon and a half of salt.
The recipe says leave it for five minutes (to let the yeast wake up and have breakfast) which I did. Then I slowly mixed in six cups of flour, as the recipe said, and started kneading.
It was like kneading rubber. I left it to rise, and it did, and it was like kneading rubber again. The dough was all lumpy and nasty looking. I don’t know what went wrong, but I decided to start again.
Bread: 1, Natalie: 0
For the second attempt, I did a video call with my mom. When in doubt, ask Mom. She knows.
Mom walked me through the attempt and in short order I had a reasonably smooth ball of dough ready to rise.
This time I let the yeast munch on its sugar and salt mix for twice as long, and added the flour more slowly, kneading between the last two cups.
Let it rise in an oiled bowl for an hour and a half or until it has doubled in size, then split the dough into two rounded loaves and put them on a greased pan covered in cornmeal.
Score an “X” into the top of the loaves and spray them with white vinegar (this makes for a crunchy crust.)
Pop your loaves into a cold oven set for 400 degrees and cook for 40 to 45 minutes.
Pour a glass of wine, because that was stressful.
And now you wait!
Forty minutes later, my bread came out of the oven absolutely perfect. No one could be more surprised than I was! It was crusty on the outside and dense, but soft, on the inside. Perfect with butter along with tomato soup for dinner.
Bread: 1, Natalie: 1
Editor’s note: Discarded uncooked yeasted dough will continue to grow after you’ve thrown it in the trash until it reaches roughly the size of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
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Natalie Johnson has been the editor of The Chronicle since 2018. What should she make next? Email her at njohnson@chronline.com.
