Baking Bread and John Keats

Baking Bread and John Keats 

I have been baking bread for fifty years yet still, rarely, ‘get-it-right’. That’s not to say I bake every week. Sometimes a month or more will pass with only commercial, or semi-commercial loaves from the local market gracing our table.

I will say, emphatically, the selection and quality of baked goods available today at the market is infinitely better than what the industry convinced us to eat back in the fifties/sixties. I still recall advertisements on many of the television western serials for Langendorf, Weber’s, Bond, and Wonder bread, and who knows how many other related brands urging us to fill up on their tasteless white product in order to become a healthier, smarter etc. young man/woman. Things don’t seem to have changed much, only the product.

I don’t have a mixer with a dough hook to mix my ingredients, (but neither did those early Middle Eastern people 8,000 years ago) but I often use a bread making machine for the initial blending and kneading. Many times, especially if I am consciously mired in some esoteric/philosophical internal discourse, or wondering just how many varieties of tomato seed I should plant, I dispense with the machine entirely, and do it all by hand. I’ve always done a lot of things by hand.

Simple breads are easy, and I don’t understand why more people don’t make their own bread, at least part of the time. With only four or five ingredients what could possibly go wrong? Or be easier? I just baked a loaf of Italian Sandwich Bread from a recipe I found in one of several dozen bread baking books on the shelf and it is, for a simple, basic, white flour bread, delicious, especially toasted.

So what was it I intended to say? I think I wanted to say a few words regarding John Keats, but like wind-dispersed pollen those thoughts have escaped their capsule and are miles away.