WEEK
23
Powerless

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.
—Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head, 1983

Somehow my KitchenAid mixer hadn’t made it into our overflowing baggage of fishing gear, kayaks, bicycles, board games, and books. Any more stuff, and we would’ve needed to bring along some Sherpas. My levain, naturally, did make the trip to Maine, and with company expected tonight for dinner in our rented cottage, I was ready to make some bread. Even if it meant—ugh!—kneading by hand. The last time I’d done this, it had taken a good twenty minutes and my arms and back had ached afterward. As they were already aching from the previous day’s kayaking with Zach, I wasn’t looking forward to the chore. How could I make this easier?

The baker who’d ridiculed me at the Kneading Conference had said that only a minute of kneading with the stand mixer was sufficient if preceded by an autolyse. It stood to reason that autolyse should reduce the hand-kneading time as well, so after mixing all the ingredients, I gave the dough a twenty-five-minute rest before kneading. Any longer than that, and I feared the dough would start to rise before I’d even started kneading.*

The difference was astounding. The dough, which started out feeling gritty and sticky, became smooth and elastic with just the first couple of turns. I had tried autolyse once before, with no discernable change, so what was different? First, I was using, on Charlie van Over’s advice, a much wetter (68 percent hydration) dough; second, about a third of it came from the levain, which already had well-developed gluten; and third—and most importantly—I was kneading by hand, not with a machine.

The function of kneading, of course, is to develop the gluten in the dough. Among the largest protein molecules found in nature, gluten consists of long, tangled chains lying about in a haphazard arrangement. Kneading stretches the coils out, aligning them side by side so that they can bond with one another, forming the strong elastic network that enables the dough to stretch and capture the carbon dioxide gases emitted by the yeast.

I discovered that I actually liked kneading by hand, feeling the dough transform under my hands from a gooey, thick batter into smooth dough with each push, turn, and fold. A quick and enjoyable seven minutes later, my dough felt ready, elastic and supple. And there was no equipment—no machinery—to clean up.

Two weeks on the Maine coast sent me home with a bellyful of lobster and a determination to redouble my efforts. My peasant bread, a yeasty pain de campagne, made with a wild yeast levain, was vastly improved over the bread of twenty-two weeks ago. The texture and gas holes I so desperately desired seemed as elusive as ever, but I wasn’t ready to give up. Before summer was over, I’d be harvesting and grinding my own wheat and baking in an earth oven. Give up? I was just getting warmed up.