WEEK
22
Kneadin’ in Skowhegan

It is all mossy and moosey.
—Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 1864

Any event with the word conference in its name is an event to be avoided, as far as I’m concerned. Even if the preceding word is kneading. Even if it’s in Maine in August, when the blue berries are piling up faster than Bangor snow in January. This one in particular, the First Annual (that’s got to be an oxymoron, no?) Bread Kneading Conference, promised to be an avoid-at-all-costs Birkenstock-shod whole-grain brown-bread affair, with seminars called “Whole Wheat Pastry Workshop” (ever munch on a whole wheat croissant?—that would cure Katie of her passion for them) and “Build a Clay Oven with Kiko Denzer.”

Wait a second—Kiko Denzer, the high priest of backyard bread-oven building, was going to be there? Denzer is the everyman’s Alan Scott. While Scott’s ovens, such as the one I’d baked in at Bobolink’s bakery, cost thousands of dollars and weigh tens of thousands of pounds, Denzer’s message is that you can build a perfectly good wood-fired oven in a weekend from earth, sand, and water found, if not in your backyard, then not far from it.

Ever since baking in Bobolink’s brick oven, I’d had a growing urge to make bread in a wood-fired oven again, so, pushing my conference misgivings aside, I told Anne, “Pack your pie tins and flatten your a’s, honey—we’re going to Maine!”

——————————————

As Anne made blueberry pies back at the cottage, I pulled into the parking lot behind the Federated Church in Skowhegan to find my worst fears about the conference seemingly confirmed. The very first, and I mean the absolute very first, person I saw was a gangly hillbilly type who looked to be sixty-five, wearing a beard that looked to be seventy-five, over a linen shirt and jeans held up by suspenders. But the attendees, about seventy in all, turned out to be much more diverse than I’d expected. True, I saw more pigtails and ponytails than I’d seen since third grade, and it was oddly reassuring to see that kerchiefs haven’t gone out of style, but the group was a mix of young and old, professional and amateur, rural and urban. There were small farmers and potters, professional bakers and home bakers, dabblers, retirees, and babies. Not to mention a statistically improbable proportion of writers.

When I heard one gentleman saying he only bakes “authentic French artisan bread,” I inquired where his bakery was.

“I’m not a baker, I’m a writer,” he snapped, insulted at the insinuation that he might be a mere baker. I should’ve known from his pressed khakis and long-sleeved checked shirt on this ninety-degree day, but caught off-guard, I did a really dumb thing.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “So am I.”

A pair of close-set eyes over a sharp nose gave him the look of an aggrieved eagle. He glared at me, I stared back, and we stood there for a moment like a couple of bandits who’d arrived simultaneously to knock off the same bank. Two writers at an obscure gathering of seventy people?

This other writer, whom I’ll refer to only as “this other writer,” was clearly not happy with my presence. He expressed his displeasure by saying one thing semipolitely, while above his head hovered a word balloon, clear as could be, with the words he was really thinking. The effect was dizzying.

“What brings you here? [How dare you cover the same event I’m covering! I’m a much more important writer than you!]”

“I’m trying to bake the perfect loaf of peasant bread.”

“What do you mean by ‘peasant bread’? You mean, a pain de campagne? [You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?]”

I explained, realizing how stupid it sounded when I verbalized my quest aloud, that I was trying to perfect just one type of bread. Although it did sound slightly better in French; pain de campagne means, literally, “country bread.”

“Do you know the origin of peasant bread? [My right pinky knows more about bread than you’ll ever know, punk.]”

I admitted I didn’t.

“World War Two. [Bet you thought it was a lot older, didn’t you?]”

I mentioned that I was hoping to bake bread in a very old place, perhaps a monastery somewhere. That seemed to pique his interest.

“Do you know Paris? [You wouldn’t know Paris, of course, because unlike me, you don’t have a flat there.]”

“Not really.”

He drew close. “There’s a monastery off the rue de Rivoli,” he whispered, as if letting me in on a secret. “Take the Métro to Rivoli, then go behind l’Église Saint-Paul, down the steps toward the Seine.”

His eagle eyes darted around nervously, either to make sure no one was listening or to watch for an unsuspecting mouse.

“You’ll find a street vendor who sells wares made in the monastery. It’s the most odd church. Catholic, yet they pray holding icons.* You may find bread there.”

I furiously scribbled down notes, feeling as if I’d stepped onto the set of The Da Vinci Code. This time I couldn’t read the balloon above his head. Was this guy giving me a valuable lead or putting me on?

Regardless, it was about the tenth time that day that the words “France” or “Paris” had been uttered, usually in response to the question, “Where’d you learn to bake?” or “What got you interested in bread?” Everyone but me seemed to be going to France to taste the bread or learn to make the bread.

The raptor and I avoided each other the rest of the day, and I focused on why I had come—to learn to build an earth oven. On the way through the parking lot, I’d wondered if the suspender-clad man with the ZZ Top beard was Kiko Denzer, for he’d fit my image of the evangelist of earth ovens, this creature who looked as if he’d risen (and not all that completely, to be honest) from the earth itself. So when I met Denzer, I was almost a little disappointed. He was a youngish-looking forty-eight, clean shaven, with curly blond hair peeking out from under a straw hat, his only other concession to my notion of him being his sandals, which, it turned out, he wore for practical reasons.

“Everyone, take off your shoes,” were his opening words to his class. “We’re going to mix some mud.”

You never saw so many pairs of shoes come off so quickly. This was a crowd that didn’t need to be encouraged to get barefoot, and in a moment, eighteen pairs of shoes littered the grass. Except there were nineteen of us.

“Your shoes are still on,” Kiko said to me, smiling.

I winced. The idea of sticking my clean feet into a mound of dirty clay along with thirty-six other feet was about as appealing as the Egyptian custom of kneading dough by foot. “Uh, I’m going to be visiting some other seminars this morning, and that clay looks pretty messy.”

Kiko was clearly disappointed with me but didn’t press it. I watched, took notes, and, with the clay oven steadily taking shape, occasionally wandered off to hear other talks. In the afternoon, I sat in on a lecture on raising grain, which I thought might be useful, as my own wheat was ripening back home. The speaker was the parking-lot longbeard. I strained to hear his unamplified words in the church community room, my mind drifting off, and I reflected on the fact that this bread conference was being held in and outside a church hall. It seemed fitting, as the event felt like a church community supper, full of optimism and the conviction that somehow we were saving the world from its path of white bread and factory farming. Throughout the day, I’d heard people wax optimistic about the rise in the state’s organic farming acreage; the recovery of wheat, once widely grown in Maine but now a niche crop; the dramatic comeback of small farming; and the growing demand for whole-grain, locally milled products.

Needing air, I went back outside to see what else was going on. Somehow a white-flour baker had slipped into this whole-grain program. This guy knew his craft. In fact, all of the bakers working here knew their craft, all baking in portable, unfamiliar wood-fired ovens that had been brought in on trailers, working, not in their climate-controlled kitchens, but outdoors in the ninety-degree heat, and producing beautiful breads. The white-flour baker was taking questions as his session wound down. I couldn’t resist.

“How do you get those much-desired, irregular air holes in bread?”

He misunderstood my question and started to tell me how to eliminate air holes. Jeez. How could anyone have that problem?

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. I have the opposite problem. My bread is like a kitchen sponge. I’m trying to get some air holes into it.”

“You’re probably overkneading or not using enough water. How long are you kneading at second speed?”

“Twelve minutes in my KitchenAid,” I said. “Less if I autolyse,” I added so he wouldn’t think I was a dumb novice. He let his mouth drop open.

“Twelve minutes?! In a KitchenAid?” Everybody turned around in their seats to look at the dumb novice.

“A KitchenAid beats the hell out of the dough,” he lectured, “unless you have a new model with the different dough hook, but even then, three minutes is plenty. If you autolyse, you probably need only a minute. Every turn of that dough hook whips oxygen into the dough.”

A minute? Hardly seemed worthwhile to drag the thing out. In fact, I didn’t know it then, but I had used my KitchenAid for the last time.