WEEK
21
With Friendships Like This . . .

Friendship is not so simple.
— Albert Camus

“Eeek!” Anne had screamed that fateful day as she opened the refrigerator door. She jumped clear across the room, fulfilling the foreboding I always have upon returning home after a vacation. As I approach our street, I often think I smell smoke, confirming the vague dread I’ve had all week that the electrical wiring I did without a permit in 1992 has shorted and the house is now a charred wreck. Or the water pipes have burst. Or I left the back door wide open and a family of deer has taken possession of our living room. Not that my neurosis is totally unfounded. We have in fact returned after a week away to find the unreliable front door blown wide open (but no deer or burglars present—the house was apparently too cold for either) and water dripping from the light fixtures. But none of my worries had ever included the refrigerator.

“Calm down,” I said, assuming that the milk jug had leaked again. I have an amazing skill for buying the one jug out of sixty that has a pinhole leak in the bottom. I opened the refrigerator.

“Yow!” I cried, jumping backward and slamming the door. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said, “but we’re going to need a bigger boat.”

“Or Steve McQueen. It looks like the Blob.”

Having exhausted our Hollywood analogies, we cautiously approached the refrigerator like a couple of timid explorers entering a cave.

“You go first,” Anne said.

I cracked open the door. Slime rolled out onto the floor. What a mess. A glutinous, beige gook was draped over everything on the top two shelves and the inside of the door. Some of it had hardened onto the walls of the refrigerator, creeping into every crevice, coating every surface. In other places it was still fresh and very much alive. Anne spotted the culprit—a one-quart plastic container with the words “Friendship Bread” written on it. The lid had blown off and was nowhere in sight. Anne gingerly picked up the container even as ooze continued to flow over the top, like an active volcano, and dropped it into the garbage.

“Martha’s friendship bread,” she muttered with disgust as we started mopping up the mess. Several weeks earlier, our babysitter had given us this mysterious container of friendship bread starter, onto which was taped an index card with the recipe for baking friendship bread, plus instructions on passing the starter along.

Apparently it was a well-established tradition in town. Of Amish origin (so the story goes), the idea is to pass this container of bread starter from neighbor to neighbor. If you’re lucky enough to have it find you, the instructions call for letting this yeast culture ferment at room temperature for four days before adding equal parts flour, sugar(!), and milk(!!). After letting it sit another five days at room temperature(!!!), you use one-third of it to make your “bread” and pass on the other two-thirds, along with feeding instructions and the bread recipe, to not one but two unsuspecting neighbors.

Rather than being appreciative of this gift, we found ourselves faced with an unplanned project that we had to deal with, ready or not. “My people,” Anne noted dryly—meaning the Irish—“bake the bread before giving it away.”

“Sounds like a gastronomic chain letter,” I mused, rather wary of ingesting this substance that had been sitting on countless countertops around town for who knows how many weeks, months, or even years. What really caught my attention was the warning, “DO NOT USE METAL SPOON OR BOWL!” Why? Was it corrosive?

“We’re terrible people, aren’t we?” Anne said. “It is a nice way for a community to bond.”

“That’s what Jim Jones said as he was serving up the Kool-Aid. Look at this recipe. A cup of oil, a cup of sugar, and . . . vanilla pudding? This isn’t bread, it’s a Twinkie.” Still, we couldn’t very well just throw it out. So until we could figure out exactly what to do with it, we stuck it in the fridge. And promptly forgot about it and went on vacation. But it didn’t forget about us. While we were lounging on a North Carolina beach, growing fat on Carbon’s Golden Malted waffles, the Blob was growing fat on sugar and spoiled milk, growing and growing and growing and finally bursting from the confines of its plastic Chinese-soup-container prison.

“I’m never going to get this refrigerator clean,” Anne muttered as we mopped, wiped, scraped, and rinsed for the next hour. This wasn’t mere hyperbole. The hardened slime was more difficult to remove than old paint, and we would ultimately end up throwing out the refrigerator. It was due to be replaced soon, anyway.

In truth, friendship bread did sound like a nice tradition, and this is how bread had been sustained for thousands of years. The Egyptians, you’ll recall, didn’t use yeast from a foil packet in the refrigerator; they saved a bit of the dough as a starter from each day’s kneading to kick off the next day’s bread. And I’m sure they passed a little starter along to family members and neighbors, though probably absent the warning about metal utensils.

——————————————

Now, with Charlie’s twelve-year-old starter from Alaska in the refrigerator, I had joined that tradition, and I was secretly rather happy and proud about it. Twelve years old. But would it give me the alveolar, netted crumb that Charlie had promised? I just hoped that I could keep the beast alive long enough to find out.

The next weekend I baked my first loaf of peasant bread using Charlie’s levain. I was hooked. The naturally leavened dough rose slowly (even with the dash of instant yeast Charlie recommended to give the levain a little boost) and not as high as a commercial-yeast-risen dough—in fact, it hardly rose at all—but making bread this way felt pure and was immensely satisfying. The question was, how would it taste, and, more to the point, would the levain give me my gas holes?

At dinner, I sliced off the end piece and held it up for everyone to see.

“Holes!” Katie cried.

“Holes!” Anne yelled.

“Holy sh . . .,” I started to yell.

Charlie had been right. Switching to a levain was the key—but not to every door. The second slice had fewer holes than the first, and the one after that had none. In fact, the middle 80 percent of the boule was too dense and too moist. Still, it was the best loaf of bread I’d ever baked, and I was elated.

The crumb had a rich, natural flavor, a bit tangy but not nearly as strong as a San Francisco sourdough, a result not only of the wild yeast and bacteria in the levain, but of the long, cool fermentation, which allowed time for the production of various organic compounds such as alcohols, esters, ketones, and aldehydes—scientists have identified over two hundred such compounds in a fermented dough—which even in their minuscule amounts provide the signature taste and smell that we associate with freshly baked artisan bread.

The real treat, however, was the crust, extraordinarily sweet and bursting with flavor, and for once not rock-hard. If I could get the entire loaf to taste like the crust, I’d have the best bread on the planet. Of course, to make the crumb taste like the crust is physically impossible, for the crust—both its brown color and its unique, sweet flavor—is formed by a complex chemical process known as the Maillard reaction, which begins to take place at about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that the surface of the bread can easily reach, but not the moist interior, which never rises above 212 degrees, the boiling point of water.

During the Maillard reaction, proteins under high heat break down (or “denature”) and recombine with sugar molecules and all those wonderful products of fermentation to form dozens of new flavor compounds, which in turn break down to form even more compounds, hundreds in all, giving the crust a flavor as different from the crumb as toast (also a Maillard-reaction product) is to bread.

For the first time, I had baked a loaf of bread that I didn’t feel I needed to apologize for. As I placed the replenished levain in the fridge, though, Anne pointedly asked, “What are you doing with that?”

“I’m putting it in the refrigerator. What does it look like I’m doing with it?”

“I mean next week. When we go on vacation. You’re not leaving it here, are you?”

So it could creep out of the container and destroy another refrigerator?

“Of course not,” I improvised, thinking this was like having a pet. “I’m bringing it with us. Got to make the bread.”

Even on vacation.