I regained my sense of self by baking bread

By Daniel Neman | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Something was missing from my life. I was feeling restless. Listless. All kinds of less.

I didn’t know what the problem was, until I stumbled upon a great-looking recipe for bread. And that made all the difference. I hope.

I happened to be on the King Arthur Flour website because I needed a bottle of Tahitian vanilla. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t buy vanilla from a flour company, but I couldn’t even buy it from the company that makes it, unless I wanted to buy 8 ounces of it at a time. Vanilla starts to lose its flavor after two years. I can’t imagine using a full cup of it in two years.

So I went to King Arthur, which sells it in the quantity I wanted. Incidentally, they wanted to charge me $10 to ship a single little bottle of it, but shipping is free if you spend more than $75 on their site. So I ended up spending an additional $50 on things I didn’t really need in order to save $10. I’m not convinced of the wisdom of that.

While I was on the King Arthur site looking for items to add to the cart — Do I really need pumpernickel flour? — I happened upon a recipe for what they call French Style Country Bread. The photos showed one of the most gorgeous loaves of bread I had ever seen.

I was hooked. I wanted to make that bread. I wanted to make that bread right then.

Never mind that we had just purchased an entire loaf of semolina bread from our favorite bakery and had not even started eating it. I was going to make the French Style Country Bread.

And that is when I realized what I had been missing.

Because of certain changes in my professional life, I have been doing less cooking than I used to. I knew that. But what I did not consider was that I was also doing less baking.

I missed baking desserts for my job, though my bathroom scale was happier for it. But it had not occurred to me how much I missed baking bread.

Like so many other people, I began baking bread in earnest during the COVID pandemic. I was working at home — in the kitchen, where I had set up my laptop computer. We needed bread. I could bake bread while working. I probably baked two loaves a week or close to it. I would have baked more, if we could have eaten it.

It was heavenly. First, of course, there is nothing better than working in your kitchen — and especially if you’re writing about food in your kitchen — surrounded by the aroma of bread in the oven.

But more important, baking all that bread satisfied a need not just to create something but also, more primally, to get my hands in the dough. There is something blissfully fulfilling about working dough with your hands.

I wish I could say the loaf of French Style Country Bread that I made worked out as well as I’d hoped. I wish I could say it had the open, airy crumb shown in the enticing picture online.

But no. My loaf tasted amazing, but it did not have the texture I craved. My loaf was kind of dense. Good, but dense. What can I say? I’m rusty. I had baked only one other loaf of bread since I returned to working in the office nearly two years ago.

I think I know what I did wrong. The recipe says to knead the dough for 10 to 12 minutes, adding flour as necessary to make a soft dough. I paid attention to the time, rather than the feel of the dough.

If you make bread, you know that the more you knead it, the more moisture comes to the surface, and so you have to add flour to keep it dry and supple. I kept adding flour — more than the maximum ¾ cup called for in the recipe — and that’s what kept the crumb tight and dense.

But now I have the old fire back again. As soon as we finish this loaf, I’m going to make it again.

OK, as soon as we finish this loaf and also the loaf of semolina. Then I’m going to make it again.

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