One Saturday morning as I was planning our meals for the week we had this exchange:
Kayla: Any
meal requests?
Donnie: I’d
like to eat more gluten free meals.
Kayla: Me too! Let’s do a gluten free week.
Donnie: Cool. Wait… is pizza gluten free?
Kayla: Ha.
Donnie: Are tortillas gluten free?
Kayla: You
can’t do a gluten free week, forget it.
Donnie: No,
I can. I just need to plan. What week do you want to do this?
Kayla: This week?
Donnie: Oh.
Five minutes later…
Donnie: I’ve
always wanted to go to a restaurant and ask, “Is this gluten free?”
Five minutes later…
Kayla: You
know we won’t be able to have beer.
Donnie: (no response)
Five minutes later…
Donnie: This
is not the week.
Kayla: You’re not doing it? I’m not doing it if you’re not doing it.
Donnie: No,
I’m not doing it.
The truth is, I do feel better when I avoid wheat. I used to have horrible bloating until I realized that the culprit was handfuls of Triscuits. I’ve also been trying to drink less beer, which is basically fermented bread juice.
But bread making seems like an important skill. Something adults should know how to do. Plus, when I buy bread at the grocery store, I
agonize over the choice between the local Shadeau Bakery bread, which is “multigrain”
but is made with white flour, and the commercially processed whole
grain loaf that has ingredients not found in nature.
Neither is ideal.
Despite a nagging fear that the Bob’s Red Mill recipe I used
the last time might be at least partially to blame for last month’s disaster, I
decided to give Bob another chance. Some
of the other recipes I researched called for milk or sugar and I wanted
something with fewer ingredients. But
because I still didn’t entirely trust Bob, I halved his recipe. Better to end up with half an ogre than a full one.
In doing so, I realized that the little yeast packets you
buy at the grocery store contain only ONE tablespoon—not two. WTF? So my last loaf only had half as much yeast as
it should have, which explains why it didn’t rise. At all.
After FOUR HOURS. This time, I
also approached the water amounts as general suggestions.
The last time I tried to make bread, I did so without really
understanding what the texture of the dough should be. I assumed that the flakiness was okay and
that it would bake itself out. Wrong. I should have been adding water until the
dough felt spongy and pliable (thanks, Google!). More like pizza dough than cookie dough.
Google also taught me that it is better to knead dough on a
large flat surface than in a bowl. In retrospect,
this seems sort of obvious.
This second attempt was going so beautifully that I decided
to get creative and make a honey sea salt glaze to add a little pizzazz.
Pop quiz: try to
spell pizzazz! It’s not easy. I kept writing “to add a little pizzas”.
To make the glaze, I whisked together honey, sea salt, and
water. I rubbed it all over my dough
ball and then rolled the whole thing in some old fashioned oats.
When this came out of the oven, I almost cried. This must be how people feel after giving birth! Except without all the blood.
Except, as it turned out, there was some blood. Lots of it. This is the year to learn to make bread and it
was also the year to sharpen my knives. And
it was nearly the year to join Maggie’s “9 ½ Finger Club”:
After the bleeding stopped, I was able to enjoy the fruits
of my labor. Or, to be more precise, the
glutens of my labor.
With lots of butter.
No comments:
Post a Comment