52 Loaves Read online

  ALSO BY WILLIAM ALEXANDER

  The $64 Tomato:

  How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity,

  Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential

  Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

  52

  Loaves

  ONE MAN’S RELENTLESS

  PURSUIT OF TRUTH, MEANING,

  AND A PERFECT CRUST

  William Alexander

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2010 by William Alexander.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Descriptions of the seven Divine Offices used with

  permission from the Abbey of the Genesee.

  Leeuwenhoek’s sketches of yeast cells © The Royal Society.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Alexander, William, [date]

  52 loaves : one man’s relentless pursuit of truth, meaning,

  and a perfect crust / William Alexander.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN 9781616200060

  1. Bread. 2. Bread—Anecdotes.

  3. Alexander, William, [date]. I. Title.

  TX769.A4858 2010

  641.8'15—dc22 2009049656

  I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So if you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.

  —Emily Dickinson

  They say bread is life. And I bake bread, bread, bread. And I sweat and shovel this stinkin’ dough in and out of this hot hole in the wall, and I should be so happy! Huh, sweetie?

  — Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. Vigils

  THE PREVIOUS OCTOBER. Rarin’ to Go

  II. Lauds

  WEEK 1. Bake Like an Egyptian

  WEEK 2. Naturally Pure and Wholesome

  WEEK 3. The Winter Wheat of Our Discontent

  WEEK 4. The Purloined Letter

  WEEK 5. To Die For

  WEEK 6. Steamed

  WEEK 7. Old Believer

  WEEK 8. “The Rest of the World Will Be Dead”

  WEEK 9. Gute Recipes

  WEEK 10. Born to Run

  III. Terce

  WEEK 11. Goddisgoode

  WEEK 12. Choreography

  WEEK 13. Note to Self

  WEEK 14. Metric Madness

  WEEK 15. We Make Biomass

  WEEK 16. A Chill in the Air

  WEEK 17. The Short, Unhappy Life of an Assistant Baker

  WEEK 18. Waffling

  WEEK 19. Playing the Percentages

  WEEK 20. Feed It or It Dies

  WEEK 21. With Friendships Like This . . .

  WEEK 22. Kneadin’ in Skowhegan

  WEEK 23. Powerless

  IV. Sext

  WEEK 24. White-Bread Diet

  WEEK 25. Sweeney Todd

  WEEK 26. Pane Toscano

  WEEK 27. The Sound of One Hand Kneading

  WEEK 28. A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

  WEEK 29. Kneadless to Say

  WEEK 30. Bread Shrink

  WEEK 31. State Fair

  V. None

  WEEK 32. Don’t Fear the Reaper

  WEEK 33. Miller’s Crossing

  WEEK 34. Blown Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August)

  WEEK 35. Lecture to Young Men on Chastity

  WEEK 36. Terror Firma

  WEEK 37. Indian Giver

  WEEK 38. Terror Firma Redux

  WEEK 39. A Lot of ‘Splainin’ to Do

  WEEK 40. Feeling Like Manure

  WEEK 41. “Nous Acceptons Votre Proposition”

  VI. Vespers

  WEEK 42. God Bless the TSA

  WEEK 43. Puttin’ On the Ritz

  WEEK 44. The Count of Asilah

  WEEK 45. The Trials of Job: Travel Edition

  WEEK 46. A Time to Keep Silence

  VII. Compline

  WEEK 47. What Would Bruno Do?

  WEEK 48. Half-Baked

  WEEK 49. A Levain of My Own

  WEEK 50. Cracked

  WEEK 51. Let Them Eat . . . Brioche?

  WEEK 52. The Perfect Future in the Present

  Recipes

  A Note about the Recipes

  Building a Levain

  Peasant Bread (Pain de Campagne)

  Pain au Levain Miche

  Baguette à l’Ancienne

  Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille

  A Baker’s Bookshelf

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  “Next!”

  My heart was pounding so hard at the airport security checkpoint, I was certain the TSA agent would see it thrusting through my jacket.

  “Laptop,” I blurted out for no apparent reason, my voice cracking like a teenager’s on a first date as I placed my computer into the plastic tray.

  “Liquids.” The TSA inspector held up my regulation Baggie stuffed with three-ounce bottles and nodded approvingly.

  I reached into my backpack and casually pulled out a half-gallon plastic container filled with a bubbling, foul-smelling substance. “Sourdough.” I might just as well have said, “Gun!”

  “Uh-uh, you can’t bring that on a plane!” a TSA Official stationed at the next line called out. I wanted to say, “Who asked you?” but sensibly kept my mouth shut as I looked around nervously. Thanks to that blabbermouth, every passenger and TSA employee at the security checkpoint was looking my way.

  “Can he bring dough?” another inspector yelled.

  A buzz had now started, with murmurs of “dough” audible from the passengers behind me, all of whom, I’m sure, hoped they weren’t on my flight.

  A tense and chaotic ten minutes later, I found myself talking with a stone-faced supervisor.

  “Sourdough?” He sighed with the heavy air of someone who didn’t want to deal with a situation—any situation.

  “Twelve years old!” I beamed. So that I could say it wasn’t a liquid and thus subject to the three-ounce rule, I’d added half a pound of flour to the wet sourdough before leaving the house. Unfortunately, this had the effect of stiffening it into something with an uncanny resemblance to plastique explosive. As the supervisor started to run a wand around it, I held my breath, half expecting it to beep myself.

  “A thirteen-hundred-year-old monastery in France is expecting this,” I offered.

  His trained poker face remained blank, forcing me to pretend he’d asked why.

  “They managed to keep science, religion, and the arts alive during the Dark Ages, even risking their lives to protect their library from the barbarians who burned everything else in sight. After thirteen centuries, though, they’ve forgotten how to make bread.”

  Still no reaction. None. Trying to lighten the mood, I added, “The future of Western civilization is in your hands.”

  That bit of hyperbole got his attention. “You’re a professional baker?”

  My wife coughed.

  “Um, no.”

  He arched an eyebrow. But no matter. Whatever transpired in the next few minutes, I was boarding that plane with my starter. I had to. During nearly a year of weekly bread making, I’d disappointed my wife, subjected my poor kids to countless variations on the same leaden loaf, and, most of all,
let myself down, time and time again, loaf after loaf, week after week. Well, I was not going to let down the monks at l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle.

  Granted, I was as unlikely a savior of a monastery as you could imagine—a novice baker who’d lost his faith and hadn’t set foot in a church in years, carrying a possibly illegal cargo of wild yeast and bacteria practically forced on me by an avowed atheist—but nevertheless I was determined to succeed, for I was on a mission.

  A mission from God.

  I.

  Vigils

  Vigils, or watching in the night, is prayer to be celebrated in the middle of the night. In monastic communities the concentration on vigilance begins with this Office, enveloped in and supported by darkness and silence.

  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.