WEEK
6
Steamed

In the end we will listen to the voice of the machines. We will have to. There is no choice. We will not go back to tallow dips while the great shining wheels are there to bring us light.
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874 – 1966), U.S. journalist and labor activist

Steam—it’s not just for irons! It’s the miracle vapor that’s indispensable in bread making from start to finish! Steam powers the locomotives that carry the wheat from the fields of South Dakota to the mills of Minneapolis, drives the rollers that crush the grain into flour, and lastly, in your own oven, provides the crispy-chewy crust that turns good bread into great bread!

Clearly I missed my calling as a nineteenth-century ad man.

The ad would be a little dated today, except for the last part: there is still no substitute for steam when it comes to the final stage of wheat processing, baking a loaf of bread. I was looking forward to spending a calm day in the kitchen after a second consecutive week fighting a bizarre series of mechanical breakdowns that I’d taken to calling the Revenge of the Machines. The initial skirmish with technology had come when, merging onto the highway on the way home from work, I’d seen a huge plume of black smoke in my rearview mirror. “Wow, where’s that coming from?” I said out loud before I realized it was coming from me. The smoke was so thick, so black, that the headlights of the car behind me vanished in the dusk.

The exhaust end of my car looked like one of those Kuwaiti oil wells that were set on fire after the first (the “good”) Gulf War. I made it home, but the car ended up in the shop for several days with a blown gasket somewhere or other. Within a week our other car downshifted into second gear all by itself at 60 miles an hour while we were on a 150-mile highway trip. That car ended up in the shop for two weeks while the dealer installed the new transmission required by yet another blown gasket somewhere or other.

All of this attention to cars apparently made the oil burner jealous, for it decided to spew a black, oily smoke remarkably similar to the car’s oily exhaust, making the house smell like a Kuwaiti oil well during . . . you know. The cause? Yep, a leaky gasket. Then the connections on the stovetop sparked and turned black and the dishwasher sent water cascading onto the kitchen floor (gasket again), and a week later (I swear, I’m not making this up) the washing machine sent water cascading onto the laundry room floor (also known, unfortunately, as the kitchen ceiling). The Revenge of the Machines was taking no prisoners, giving me, I was told, the perpetual, hollow-eyed look of a hunted man.

At least, this morning, I could escape all that and immerse myself in the ancient tradition of bread baking, temporarily escaping the industrial age and all that it has wrought. All I had to worry about this week was getting some steam into my oven.

Most bread books explain why steam is important. It keeps the crust pliable and soft so the bread can continue to rise in the oven as the intense heat fuels the yeast into one last breath of furious metabolism, a dramatic process called oven spring. Less known, however (I found this in Harold McGee’s technical book on food and cooking called On Food and Cooking), is the fact that steam also hastens heat transfer to the bread during those first few critical minutes in the oven. Steam is a great conductor of heat; that’s why you can sit in a 212-degree dry sauna but not a 212-degree steam bath.

Commercial bread ovens have steam injectors built in, but the home baker has to improvise. I’d tried various systems over the years. First I put a rimmed baking sheet on the bottom shelf and poured in a cup of water just before loading the bread. This made steam, but it also made red-hot spittle and noises that scared the bejesus out of me as it buckled like a ’57 Chevy hitting a telephone pole. Still, I kept using it, for a while substituting ice cubes for water, which was less traumatic but also made less steam and no doubt lowered the oven temperature as well. After a while I grew weary of the sight of this rusty, warped pan and threw it out.

Next I tried a technique recommended in some books: splashing water directly onto the oven floor. Anne caught me doing this and threatened to revoke my baking license if I didn’t cease immediately. “What, a little water is going to hurt the oven?” I’d said defensively, yet I stopped nevertheless, switching to one of those squeeze-operated plant misters you can buy for a couple of bucks. But using that required an anaerobic workout to get a decent amount of mist into the oven—squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, huff, huff, puff—while the oven door was wide open, allowing all that precious heat to flow out.

Following the centuries-old tradition of bakers everywhere, I hopped onto the Internet, where I soon learned I wasn’t the only one trying to make steam. Some entrepreneur, taking advantage of desperate home bakers like myself, was offering a $250 device that consisted of a stainless steel chafing dish cover (the kind you see at buffet tables) with a hole drilled in the side, a baking stone, and a handheld clothes steamer.

I’d almost given up hope of finding anything better than my squeeze bottle when, browsing in a garden shop, I happened upon a small pressurized sprayer intended for houseplants. After a few easy pumps to build pressure, this little device really sent out the mist, and much faster than my squeeze-trigger plant mister. The best feature was the sprayer’s long, narrow neck, which would allow me to mist deep into the oven by opening the oven door just a crack, keeping heat loss to a minimum.

I slid my latest loaf onto the stone, stuck in the gooseneck, closed the oven door over it, and pressed the trigger. Psssssssssst! Steam poured out the oven door! This was fantastic, this was Old Faithful, this was the Union Pacific steaming into San Francisco! I sprayed some more. Pssssssssst! This was—crack, snapple, pop, shatter!

“What was that?” Anne wondered out loud.

I opened the oven door to investigate. “I don’t see anything unusual.”

Anne peered over my shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”

The oven was dark inside. The light had blown out. And then some. When I pulled the loaf out an hour later, shards of glass from the heavy protective lens that covers—make that covered—the lightbulb littered the baking stone and the oven floor. Nothing was left of the bulb itself but the metal base and two insect-antennae filaments that waved, taunting me, at the slightest vibration. Apparently I had misted a little too deep into the oven, scoring a direct hit on the bulb on the back wall.

“Do you think any of the glass got into the bread?” Anne asked.

Oh, yikes. I stared at my loaf; I stared at my oven, the latest casualty of the Revenge of the Machines. Was there no end? Although I have to confess, revenge was justified in this case, for I had abused the machine, forgetting that cold mist plus 450-degree glass equals shattering. Still, I was more than a little unsettled by the fact that even bread baking had not given me refuge from humankind’s fragile coexistence with the machines we depend upon so heavily. Bread baking is as homey, as removed from technology, factories, and engines, as you can get.

Or is it? As I picked glass out of the oven, I realized that this seemingly simple, earthy, non-factory-made loaf of bread could not in fact have been made without dozens of complex, sophisticated machines, from the combines that reap the wheat, isolate the kernels, and strip off the chaff; the trucks and trains that transport it; the computer-controlled factories that make the yeast; the mills that grind the flour; and the car in which I drove to the store to buy the flour, all the way down to the stand mixer I used for kneading and the electric oven that baked the bread.

What, then, is so basic, so supposedly back-to-nature, about baking bread? It seems it’s really anything but. My loaf of “rustic” bread is so far down the supply chain that I can’t see the beginning of it. Was the Revenge of the Machines simply an inevitable result of our being heavily dependent on machinery? Deep inside (I consider myself a man of science, not of mysticism; in my day job I’m the director of technology at a research institution), I knew it wasn’t a personal affront, yet I couldn’t help thinking that these breakdowns were sending me a message. It would take several months to fully reveal itself, but a new goal was fermenting, slowly forming in my mind: to actually bake a loaf of bread from scratch, out of reach of the Revenge of the Machines. Growing my own wheat was a start, but I wanted to do more. I wanted not just to say it, but to really, truly bake like an Egyptian.