Cleverly written food stories have a way of filling us with longing for exotic places or the desire to follow a glamorous chef as they peruse a seaport or farmers market for fabulous ingredients. How is it that some people seem to have family culinary traditions that lend themselves to stories of foreign lands and cuisine, leaving the rest of us sitting on the sidelines peering in? For some reason we are unable to see what is special right under our own nose. Our own experiences seem as unspectacular as white bread. These thoughts lead me at the age of fifty-two to examine my own food heritage and out of that came the determination to learn how to bake (white) bread from my ninety year old mother, Daisy Mae. Mom is a pro; she began baking bread as a child for her family, Mom, Dad and five siblings, on their rugged Montana homestead.
Homemade bread has been a fact of life for our family. I can remember coming home from school on a blistery cold winter day and walking into a steamy warm house filled with the scent of yeasty bread. Carving off a slice still warm from the oven, homemade butter dripping from the edges, nothing could be as comforting. Even before that my love for bread and fermenting dough was well documented; a photo of me as a toddler, standing by the oven door where the bread was proofing, big grin on my face, reaching for a pinch of the satiny substance. I can still conjure up the taste, first elastic spring, next the sprite like prickle of fermentation on my tongue, and then full up the sinuses scent of yeasty nutty wheat.
My Mom’s bread isn’t perfect in everyone’s eyes. It is not the crusty hearth style so popular today. Shaped and baked in loaf pans, this is slicing bread, perfect for a hardy sandwich or toast, yet sturdy enough to mop the drippings left on our dinner dishes, making us all members of the clean plate club. A standing joke of my fathers was to tell how Daisy Mae’s bread took second prize at the county fair, and then the reminder, there were only two entries.
As kids we would beg our Mom to buy the spongy white bread from the grocery store. Our friends all ate that bread and it was so amusing at their house to pull the crust from the slice, then squeeze the center into a small pill like ball, then pop it in our mouth. Looking back it was not truly food, all soft foam without any substance. Children move away from home, anxious to get on with life. Unmindful of all they leave behind, knowing that the future holds something enticing; shedding family customs for the desirable unknown.
In reflection, bread is still an important feature in my life. Sadly, the love for a great loaf never seems to match my personal baking skills. Was it my first attempts, during a health food craze that had me filling the flour bin with whole wheat? Whatever the problems were, the rock hard dense substance was amusingly referred to as “lead bread”. When the renaissance of artisanal bakeries arrived we were the first in line!
In the mid-nineties my family followed in the footsteps of Patricia Wells’ The Food Lover’s Guide to France. (Workman Publishing 1987) In Paris we made a pilgrimage to the celebrated bakery of Lionel Poilane. Next we ate pain au chocolate purchased from patisseries around the entire country. We even made a side trip to a tiny hamlet in Burgundy, by the name of Fixen, in search of a restored community bread oven, which we never found.
Our path to the perfect loaf continues, over the years we have built two wood fired ovens. The first was made from adobe following plans found in an old magazine article. When our friend Don Reed who teaches baking and pastry at Seattle Culinary Academy visited and told us of the design flaws making the oven non-conducive to baking the perfect loaf; the long narrow cigar shape, too high of a ceiling and the door opening is too large to allow the heated air to circulate properly for the necessary radiation and convection to take place. Don suggested that we build a “real” brick oven. With a copy of the Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens, by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1999) and photos of an oven building workshop on the internet, we were off! Don returned over spring break to help us get started and our oven now delights us with each firing.
The new oven does bake exceptionally well and with a skilled baker, crusty, crackly, delicious sturdy puffs decorate our table. The key words being skilled baker, not me, my loaves still require something. I know it is not a lack of admiration; I have loved everything about dough since toddlerdom. Is it over or under proofing or wrongful kneading?
Daisy Mae, moved to our farm in 1992. At that time many of our friends were purchasing bread machines and we would joke that we had our own “Daisy” bread machine. Since then I have learned some of her bread baking secrets; adding mashed potatoes to the mix helps develop a smoother texture, bacon grease is her choice of fat which does add a special character to her bread, and when you pull the hot loaves from the oven, slip them out of their pans and wipe the outer surface with a rag soaked in milk, which helps keep the crust soft for slicing.
Maybe it is time for me to go back and get a lesson from Mom, who at ninety is still baking bread. Over ten years ago she had a stroke, 6 years ago she fell and broke her hip and the one thing that motivated her more then any to get back on her feet, was a hunger for a slice of her own home baked loaf. Daisy Mae has many opinions, which she freely shares and this she firmly states; “I like white bread!” And not just any white bread, but the recipe her mother used, the same recipe she follows today. It is not written down on a recipe card, but each step and ingredient is etched upon her heart and in the reach of her hands.
Raised on a homestead near Ryegate, Montana where wheat was king, Daisy says “Bread and butter were always on the table for every meal”. She recalls spring days where the whole family worked in four hour shifts to work up the fields getting them ready to plant wheat. They only stopped the one tractor they shared for refueling, or to switch to the next driver, tag-team style farming from sunup to sun down. It was sweaty dusty work and they were under the gun to get the grain in the ground to capture the seasonal moisture.
Today Daisy still uses her mothers hand crank mixer, a special notch in the counter top where the clamp is set that slips into the bottom of the bucket. It is hard work for her but she pushes on, strong will and determination are what’s left of the muscles developed across the years of her long life.
What have I learned? Daisy Mae loves bread; it is the staff of life, it is the center of the table, it is constant, it is sustenance.
White bread from the Dale family table (makes five good sized loaves)
Cooked potato, (about 1 cup) pureed
1 rounded tablespoon Yeast , ½ cup warm water (dissolve yeast in water)
2 quarts warm water (add pureed potatoes to water)
1/4 cup sugar (stir in water potato mixture)
12 cups sifted Unbleached White flour (measure flour into large bowl add water potato mixture and stir until combined)
½ cup Bacon grease or lard
2 Tablespoons salt
Sir in yeast
Add fat and salt
10 cups sifted flour (sir into other ingredients)
Place on floured surface to knead (10 minutes until smooth and elastic) put in greased covered container place in warm spot to rasie 2 hours, punch down, let rise 1 more hour. Shape into loaves, let raise until double in size, bake 350 * for one hour
