THE PREVIOUS
OCTOBER
Rarin’ to Go

How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?
—Julia Child

I was up before dawn, watching and waiting for daylight, and was rewarded with a promising sunrise that delivered a glorious, sparkling October day, a Flemish landscape painting come to life. With the low mountains of New York’s Hudson Highlands as my backdrop, I set out across the fields, endless rows of rich red soil stretching to the horizon, a sack of wheat slung over my breast, swinging my arm to and fro in an easy rhythm, sowing while startled birds furiously flapped their wings into flight, fleeing the advancing rain of seed. The silence of late October was interrupted only by the laughter of barefoot children playing hide-and-seek among the crisp, golden cornstalks and by the church bells in the distance, which marked the passing of every quarter hour. What a great day to be alive and to be sowing life.

“Are you going to weed or stand there daydreaming?” Anne asked, snapping me out of my reverie.

My wife was on her knees, pulling weeds, her face streaked with sweat and dirt, her nose runny.

I dismissed her comment with a grunt but reluctantly joined her. “How did we ever let these beds get so out of hand?” I wondered aloud as I yanked another foot-tall clump of thistle from the earth and flung it into the wheelbarrow. We pulled and tossed, tugged and heaved, the weeds having progressed far beyond the stage where they could be removed with a hoe.

Two hours later, the neglected beds, more used to being a home to beans and tomatoes than to grain, were cleaned, raked, and ready for winter wheat. I drew shallow furrows through the earth with a triangle hoe as Anne, on all fours, her drippy nose almost touching the earth, poked seeds into the soil, four inches apart, as if planting peas, not sowing wheat. The scene was more phlegmish than Flemish, but as much as I loved the romantic notion of turning my yard into a wheat field, of sowing wheat instead of planting it, I wasn’t about to till up my lawn and construct a deer-proof fence when I already had good soil, good fencing, and available beds in the vegetable garden. And planting in neat rows, rather than broadcasting seed, would allow for efficient weeding with a hoe later.

“We need Jethro Tull’s seed drill,” I remarked as Anne continued to press seeds into the earth.

She didn’t take the bait.

“Sitting on a park bench, da, da-daaaa, eyeing little girls with bad intent,” I sang, getting her attention, not to mention thoroughly irritating her. Anne had once unbuckled her seat belt and threatened to get out of the car—at sixty miles an hour—if I didn’t remove Aqualung from the CD player.

“Jethro Tull invented the seed drill, you know.”

“First of all, Jethro Tull is the group, not the lead singer. He’s Ian somebody.”

I knew that, of course, because during my freshman year in college I’d thoroughly embarrassed myself while trying to impress my dorm mates by exclaiming, “Man, I love the way that guy Tull handles the flute.” Thirty-odd years later, I was apparently still trying to redeem myself vis-à-vis Mr. Tull.

“No, no, the original Jethro Tull. His seed drill drilled the hole, dropped in the seed, and covered it up, all in one shot. Amazing invention for seventeen hundred, wasn’t it?”

“I’m out of seed.”

I retrieved the second packet. I’d spent about five dollars on two packets of wheat seeds, not the most efficient way to buy wheat, but little did I know at the time what a bargain I’d gotten. No sooner would I have the seed watered in than wheat prices would start to climb.

A neighbor walked by. “What’re you up to?” he called from the street, surprised to see us planting so late in the year.

“Baking a loaf of bread,” I answered enthusiastically.

I could see this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. “From scratch!” I added.

Still baffled, but deciding not to ask any more questions, he moved on. Just as well. Explaining what I was really up to was a good deal more complicated. I’m not sure I fully understood it myself. I was growing wheat because I was about to embark on a year of bread making, fifty-two loaves, fifty-two chances to recreate in my own kitchen a perfect loaf of bread I’d tasted only once, years ago, and I’d realized, with both surprise and embarrassment, that I really had no idea what flour was. I’d look at the white fluffy powder in the sack, at photographs of wheat fields in Nebraska, and couldn’t connect the two. They weren’t even the same color!

If I was going to master bread, I thought I should first understand wheat, and what better way than to plant it, to see it grow from a seed to a blade of grass, to keep vigil over its long winter sleep until the miraculous spring awakening, when it would spurt, with adolescent abruptness, into a tall golden stalk of grain to be harvested and ground into flour.

Besides, I just liked saying I was baking a loaf of bread “from scratch.”

“Really from scratch,” Anne muttered, poking another wheat kernel into the earth. “When will it be ready for bread?”

“If all goes well, I guess this summer.”

If all goes well. The Hudson River valley is apple country, not wheat country, and I worried there was good reason for that. My little plot was very possibly the only wheat growing within fifty miles. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t know if I was even planting the right kind of wheat for the artisan bread I planned to make, or if the wheat I’d chosen would grow in this region, or if I’d planted it too early or too late. I had no idea how I’d know when it was ripe or what to do with it when it was.

I explained all this to Anne, the better to start building the cushion for the likely disappointment later.

“So I don’t actually know how to grow wheat,” I confessed.

This was apparently her cue to invite a most unwelcome eight-hundred-pound gorilla into the garden.

“That’s all right. You don’t exactly know how to bake, either.”

She meant this optimistically, but I took it as a slightly harsh if accurate indictment. Of course, Anne was right. I didn’t really know how to bake, and I certainly didn’t know how to bake so-called artisan bread.

My wife often says that I was born too late, that because I dislike cars and other machines (which is why we were preparing the soil by hand rather than using a small rototiller), I would’ve been happier in an earlier century. She says this only because she’s never seen me on a horse. In the time she refers to, all bread was “artisan,” except no one knew it. It was made in small quantities from stone-ground flour, leavened with wild yeast, given a long, slow rise, and baked on a stone in a wood-fired brick or clay oven—the very definition, give or take, of artisan bread.

Not that it was all good bread. Far from it. Until the last century or two, wheat was a luxury in much of the world, and bread for the commoners was more often than not made of rye, barley, or other inferior grains—if it was even all grain. The preserved teeth of many of our ancestors show premature wear from the grit that was in every loaf, and unscrupulous millers were often accused of supplementing the grain with the sweepings from the sawmill downstream (the resulting bread thus being merely a precursor to the 1970s brand Fresh Horizons, which got its whop-ping fiber boost from added wood pulp).

Good, bad, or flammable, it was nevertheless what we would today broadly consider artisan bread, made by independent bakers or baked by women in communal ovens. Then the industrial age dawned, and the next thing we knew, we were all eating Wonder bread. I grew up in the fifties on cellophane-wrapped, rectangular loaves like Wonder and Silvercup (which promised to be “even whiter and soft er!”), although I insisted my mom switch to Sunbeam after Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry lassoed me into believing that a slice of their energy-packed favorite brand would have me “rarin’ to go!” That it did, but where it had me rarin’ to go was to hot lunches. I came to despise sandwiches as a kid, and no doubt the tasteless, gummy bread that stuck to the back of your teeth and the roof of your mouth was a factor.

My view of bread as something to be avoided at all costs persisted well into adulthood, and then into fatherhood, even as Hoppy and Gene rode off into the sunset, until a chance breakfast at a swanky New York restaurant changed everything. It was one of those places we could never have afforded for dinner, and even at breakfast, there were way too many forks and glasses for me to be comfortable. I surveyed the baffling landscape of silver and crystal before me.

“Is someone else going to be sitting at our table?” I asked Anne as I reached for a glass of water. “Is this yours or mine?”

“Mine is whichever one you don’t choose.”

“We should leave. I didn’t dress properly.” I tugged at the lapel of my ratty wide-wale corduroy jacket, a sandy tan island in a sea of dark blue suits. “I mean, who wears a suit to breakfast on a Sunday morning?”

“People who go to church.”

“Who goes to church in Manhattan? This is the most godless city on earth.”

As I finished that sentence, a basket of bread was delivered by a server padding on silent feet.

“Bread’s here. Can’t leave now,” Anne said.

Ugh. The dreary breadbasket. I would’ve greatly preferred a sticky bun, but needing something to do with my fidgety hands, I quickly tore off a corner from a thick, crusty, wheat-colored piece and took a bite. The dark brown, caramelized crust gave a satisfying crackle when you bit into it—not a crunch, but an actual crackle—and managed to defy physics by remaining both crispy and chewy at the same time. It was a crust to be eaten slowly, first with the teeth, then with the tongue, and it possessed a natural sweetness and yeastiness unlike any I’d ever tasted.

The bread clinging to the crust was every bit as good. It wasn’t white, wasn’t whole wheat; it was something in between, and it had a rustic quality—a coarse texture that managed to be light and airy, with plenty of holes, yet also had real substance and a satisfying resistance to the bite. This bread didn’t ball up in your mouth like white bread, and like the crust, it was yeasty and just slightly sweet, and it exhaled (yes, the bread exhaled) an incredible perfume that, cartoon-like, wafted up from the table, did a curl, and, it seemed, levitated me from the table. I was seduced, body and soul, my senses overloaded. This bread demanded the attention of more than the taste buds: it was a delight to the eyes, the nose, and the tongue as well. But years later, what I remember most about this moment is the utter surprise, the almost mystical revelation that bread could be this good. True, I had grown up with plastic-wrapped white bread, but I’d also had the occasional baguette or decent restaurant bread and had never tasted anything like this.

“Excuse me?” I finally realized that Anne was talking to me.

“I said, how’s the bread?”

“I think you’d better try it.”

When the waiter brought my eggs Benedict (at a price that should have included the rest of the chicken), I asked him what kind of bread this was.

“I think we call it peasant bread.”

Peasant bread! This was the stuff of kings. “I’ve got to learn to make this,” I said to Anne as we left the restaurant.

——————————————

That was five or six or more years ago. I hadn’t learned to make it, though I’d tried half-heartedly, and I hadn’t tasted bread anywhere near as good since. It seemed likely that if I was ever going to have the kind of bread I wanted to eat, I was going to have to apply myself. And I’d better do it soon; I feared that if I waited much longer, I’d forget what the perfect loaf tasted like. As it was, it was going to be difficult enough to reconstruct those complex tastes, textures, and aromas, and I figured it was now or never.

That makes it all sound like a very pragmatic undertaking, like growing tomatoes simply because they taste better than store-bought. Bread, however, is such a loaded food, full of symbolism and rich in history, whose very preparation produces what surely must be the most recognizable food aroma in the world, that it arguably occupies its own shelf in the food hierarchy.

This was made shockingly clear from a newspaper story I’d recently come across while munching on a slice of toast. The New York Times reported that Sunni militants in Baghdad had come up with a horrifying new strategy, every bit as effective as car bombs and sniper fire, to force Shiites out of targeted neighborhoods.

Kill all the bakers.

The toll so far was a dozen and counting, as militants systematically hunted down the bakers, closing one bakery after another by killing, kidnapping, or threatening those who made the bread. The attacks often took place in broad daylight, the customers left unharmed. The militants didn’t have to kill them; without bread, they left the neighborhood on their own. “To shut down a well-known bakery in a neighborhood, that means you paralyze life there,” one baker said.

I was shocked that bread, in the twenty-first century, still occupied such a major social—and now political—role. How little I understood about this alchemy of wheat, water, yeast, and salt. I suppose this story might have turned me off to bread, discouraging me from what I fully expected to be a lighthearted kitchen fling, but it apparently had the opposite effect, providing me with the final nudge I needed. I wanted to understand bread, to bake exceptional bread more than ever, to become a baker.

“I’m going to make bread every week for a year,” I announced to my family not long afterward, “until I bake the perfect loaf of peasant bread.”

“Every week—great! What other kinds of bread are you going to make?” Katie, sixteen, wondered.

“Nothing. Just peasant bread.”

Her face fell.

“I wouldn’t mind some croissants.”

“Or pizza,” Zach, home from college for the week, added. “Cinnamon buns . . . stuffed bread . . . baguettes . . .”

“Peasant bread,” I said flatly. “It may take me a year to perfect it.”

“I think your bread’s pretty good now,” Katie offered.

“It’s too dense and moist, and it has no air holes. And you need a hacksaw to cut through the crust,” I said, trying not to show my irritation at the compliment.

“Well, that’s true about the crust . . .”

So true that the kids refused to slice my loaves themselves, it was so difficult—not to mention hazardous.

“Fifty-two weeks of peasant bread, huh?” Zach said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “Sorry I’ll be missing that, Dad.”

“I’ll make sure you come home a year from now to the perfect loaf.”

I said this with confidence even though I’m not very good at resolutions and had already failed miserably at a dozen or so prior attempts to make this bread. Regardless, this seemed an eminently achievable goal. I wasn’t planning on mastering the violin or learning particle physics. I was merely baking a loaf of bread, and this time, I told myself, would be different. I would be disciplined and methodical; I would take a scientific approach; I would talk to bakers and read books; and mainly I would stay focused, keep my eye on the prize and my ass in the kitchen and not get diverted by interesting but irrelevant distractions, my usual undoing.

“I’ve got a year to learn,” I said with a mix of cockiness and trepidation, aware that I was staring down the eight-hundred-pound gorilla’s flared nostrils. “Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two loaves. I’m going to bake the perfect loaf of bread in a year. End of story.”

Actually, beginning of story.