Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (30 page)

One way to think about bread—and there are so
many: as food or Food, matter and Spirit, commonplace, communion, metaphor, and medium
(of exchange, transformation, sociality, etc.)—is simply this: as an ingenious
technology for improving the flavor, digestibility, and nutritional value of grass.
True, the technology doesn’t work for all grasses, mainly just wheat, and it
really only works for the seeds of that particular grass, not the leaves or stems. So
it’s not quite as ingenious as the ruminant’s system for processing grass.
The cow carries around a whole other stomach for the sole purpose of fermenting all
parts of all kinds of grass into usable food energy. Our single stomach can do no such
thing, but when, about six thousand years ago, we learned how to leaven bread, we joined
the grass eaters of the world in earnest, much to the benefit of our species (not to
mention the grasses).

Ruminant or human, the advantages of being
able to eat grass are many. Grasses occupy some two-thirds of the planet’s
landmass and, among plants, are especially good at collecting solar energy and
transforming it into biomass—“primary productivity,” in
the ecologist’s jargon. Before we learned to eat grass directly, we availed
ourselves of its energy by eating the ruminants that could eat grass or, sometimes, the
predators that ate them. Yet second- or third-hand is a wasteful way to eat grass. Only
about 10 percent of the energy consumed by an animal passes up the food chain to an
eater of that animal. (Among other things, a lot of that energy is “wasted”
by the animal in trying to avoid being eaten.) In fact, for every step up a food chain
(or “trophic pyramid”), 90 percent of the food energy is lost, which is why
big predators are so much more rare than ruminants, which in turn are so much more rare
than blades of grass.

Even as Paleolithic hunters we ate whatever
grass seeds we could gather, but figuring out a way to consistently get enough of the
little things to make a staple meal represented a momentous development for our species.
(It may also have been an obligatory development, since we were running out of grass
eaters to hunt.) Learning how to eat lower on the food chain gave us access to more
solar energy than ever before, and by doing so allowed us to create many more humans
than would otherwise exist. Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses
like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting
food from the soil and the sun.

In working with edible grasses, our
ancestors concentrated on collecting and eventually planting the biggest, most easily
accessible seeds, since the seed is the most energy-dense part of the plant, and the
only part that a single-stomached creature can readily digest. In time, the plants
evolved to gratify our desires, developing ever-bigger seeds and refraining from
“shattering”—dropping off the plant—in advance of harvest. We in turn
altered the environment to suit the plants: tilling the soil and defending them from
competitors—trees, weeds, insects, pathogens.

The new relationship between grasses and
people led to evolutionary changes on our end, too, notably the ability to produce the
enzymes needed to digest the starch in grass seeds. Yet the seeds of even these
domesticated grasses go to some lengths to protect their precious cache of nutrients
(intended to nourish their offspring, after all, not ours) and so require some degree of
processing to unlock them, whether by soaking, grinding, boiling, toasting, acidifying,
alkalizing, or some combination of these steps.

These rudimentary forms of “food
processing” worked well enough for the first few thousands years of the
agricultural era. Depending on the region, various kinds of grass seed were toasted on a
fire or ground between stones and then boiled in water to create a simple mash—a
porridge. The inert mush that resulted might not have made for inspiring meals, but it
was simple enough to prepare, and nutritious enough to eat, providing us with the energy
of starch as well as some protein, vitamins, and minerals. To make these mashes more
appetizing, people would sometimes spread them on a hot stone to cook, creating a kind
of unleavened flat bread.

And then, one day, once upon a time
somewhere in ancient Egypt, probably about six thousand years ago, something seemingly
miraculous happened to one of these porridges. We don’t know exactly how it
happened, but some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps
one off in a corner that had been neglected for a couple of days, was no longer quite so
inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it
were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: The spark of life had been
breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge—call it dough—was
heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles
in an airy yet stable structure that resembled a sponge.

It must have seemed a miracle, for a food to
double or triple in
volume on its own, or at least appear to
(prefiguring, perhaps, the miracle of the loaves that Christ would perform four thousand
years later). Though that increase proved to be an illusion—the volume added was only
air—the reality, once tasted, was almost as impressive. The food had acquired a whole
range of interesting new flavors and a delicate texture that made it much more
interesting to eat. Bread! In time people would discover that the new food was also more
nourishing than the mash from which it was made, so in that sense the miracle of the
multiplying loaves was real. No longer mere cooks—putting fire to plants and animals, or
boiling them in water—the Egyptians were now the masters of a far more complicated (and
in some ways more powerful) technology for transforming nature into nourishment. So was
born bread baking, the world’s first food-processing industry.

I really love good bread. In fact, even bad
bread is pretty good. I’d much prefer to eat a slice of fresh bread than a piece
of cake. I especially love the contrast between a rugged crust and a moist, tender,
alveolate interior—the “crumb,” as I’ve learned to call it, now that
I’ve been hanging around bakers. Alveoli are what bakers call the pockets of air
that make up the crumb. The gases trapped in those curvaceous voids carry much of the
aroma of bread, that rich complex of scents—roasty-yeasty-hazelnutty and faintly
alcoholic—that, to me, is more captivating even than the smell of wine or coffee. Though
I see no reason why I should have to choose between them, since bread goes so well with
both.

One reason to bake bread is to fill your
kitchen with that aroma. Even if the bread turns out badly, the smell of it baking never
fails to improve a house or a mood. People trying to sell their homes are
often advised to bake a loaf of bread before showing it. The
underlying idea here is that freshly baked bread is the ultimate olfactory synecdoche
for hominess. Which, when you think about it, is odd, since how many of us grew up in
homes where bread was ever baked? Yet somehow that sense memory and its association with
a happy domesticity endure. The trick has helped move quite a few houses.

To fill my house with that wonderful air is
not why I took up baking, however. Nor was it to eat good bread, a desire that today can
easily be gratified by simply buying it from one of the many good bakeries that have
sprung up in recent years. Baking is one case where outsourcing the work to
professionals has served humanity pretty well for much of the last six centuries.
(Except, perhaps, during the last century, aka the Wonder Bread Era, a notably bad time
for bread.) No, I began baking bread as a way to learn what I could about how it is made
and what it means to us—its enduring uncanny power. Few things are as ordinary as a loaf
of bread, yet the process by which it is made is extraordinary—and still something of a
mystery even to those who study it or practice it every day.

Compared with earlier and simpler methods
humans have devised for turning plants and animals into foods—the roasted chunk of meat,
say, or pot of stew, either of which an individual or a small group can pull off—a loaf
of bread implies a whole civilization. It emerges only at the end of a long, complicated
process assuming settlement and involving an intricate division of human, plant, and
even microbial labor. In addition to an agriculture and a culture of milling and baking,
the loaf of bread depends on a nonhuman culture as well: It won’t rise without the
active contribution of some highly specialized living creatures besides the baker, the
miller, and the farmer. The work of these yeasts and bacteria is the reason that the
airy loaf of bread coming out of the oven cannot be inferred from a wet mash of powdered
grass seed in the way that, say, a pork roast or stew can be
inferred
from a pig. By comparison, the delicate spongelike structure that rises in a loaf of
bread to trap the gaseous waste products of those microbes has the complexity of an
emergent system: something that is much more than, and qualitatively different from, the
sum of its simple parts.

I took up baking because I was determined to
know bread. If I somehow managed to bake a decent loaf along the way, great, but my
impetus, quite frankly, was more journalistic curiosity than a deep-seated desire to
bake my own bread. I simply wanted to get a feel for the process by getting my hands
into dough at home and in any bakery that would have me. I had little reason to believe
I’d be, or ever become, any good at it.

To the contrary. I had baked one or two
loaves years before with only middling results, and had concluded baking was probably
not for me. As a form of cooking, it seemed way too demanding—of exactitude and of
patience, neither a personal strong suit. Baking was the carpentry of cooking, and
I’ve always gravitated toward pursuits that leave considerably more room for
error. Gardening, cooking, writing, all are roomy in that way, amenable to revision and
mid-course correction. Baking by comparison seemed unforgiving, not to mention
mysterious. Leavening dough depended on managing unseen and unpredictable forces. The
recipes looked daunting. Messy, too. Plus, all the books and the bakers I consulted told
me I would need to buy a kitchen scale to measure out ingredients. In
grams.

But I would do it for the book, to learn
whatever I could about this most extraordinary ordinary food and gather enough material
to write about it. Then I would put away my scale and move on to other things.

That’s not what happened. Long after I
gathered all the material I needed to write these pages, I’m still baking. In fact
I’ve got a loaf in the oven now, and another proofing in a basket. I can’t
seem to stop.
I’ve come to love the feel of the dough in my
hands as it develops, the way, on the third or fourth turn, the inert, sticky paste
begins to cohere and then gradually become elastic, as if sinews and muscles were
forming inside it. I love (and a little bit dread) the moment of truth when I lower the
oven door to discover how much “oven spring” (if any) my loaf has achieved.
And I love the muffled static the bread emits while it cools, as the interior steam
crackles the crust during its escape, filling the kitchen with that matchless air.

And yet the breads themselves, while
occasionally handsome and flavorful, have never quite lived up to the expectations that
the baking process, with its admixture of magic and possibility, seems to inspire. The
Next Loaf always promises to rise higher, taste more complex, caramelize more
gorgeously, alveolate more idiosyncratically, and throw a more distinctive
“ear” where I scored it. So there came a point in my education as a baker
when an image of the perfect loaf took shape in my head. This was not just a visual
image, either. I could imagine how this ultimate loaf would smell and taste and feel in
the hands, too, the precise ratio of weight to volume—said volume having been exalted by
a most spectacular oven spring. Now I’m not sure I’ll be able to put away my
kitchen scale until I’ve actually baked, and tasted, that perfect loaf.