Baking Bread and Lessons Learned

I'm baking bread today, which got me thinking about the first time I baked bread...

It was the mid-1980's and I was taking the home economics class required of all students, male and female: Cooking. My parents had recently divorced and my grandmother had taken to teaching me how to cook, figuring I could help my Mom in the kitchen, so I was a bit more advanced than most of my classmates who had never turned on a stove and whose culinary abilities were limited to the newfangled craze of microwave popcorn. Knowing this, my teacher suggested I try a more advanced recipe for my homework and gave me a few selections to try. Even back then I preferred baking to cooking and I chose to try my hand at a yeast bread. That was when I discovered that there are are a few things one needs to know about yeast before working with it, particularly that you cannot say the word "yeast" around teenaged boys without grossing them out; this is because most teenaged boys do not realize that there are many different types of yeast (approximately 1,500) and it is not limited to those that result in genital infection. 

The second thing to know about yeast also applies as a general rule of baking: follow the measurements EXACTLY. Yeast - and baking in general - requires precise measuring; unless you want to create a loaf of bread the size of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, remember that less is more. 

Gotta whole lotta carbs!

The most important thing I learned about yeast is that IT'S ALIVE! Yes, even when packaged for use in baking, yeast is a living organism. It needs oxygen, water and a warm and toasty environment in order to "activate". When working with yeast, you will need to be patient. Yeast will not be rushed from it's dormant state! Anyone who has ever owned a cat is well-prepared to work with yeast; the rest of you may experience a learning curve. 

Another flashbulb memory that came racing back to me today as I put my Kitchen Aid stand mixer to work were the introductory words to the bread recipe in my mom's Betty Crocker Cookbook, circa 1960's: 

"So you've decided to bake bread? High time you tried!" 

Wow, Betty, tell me how you really feel about those of us who rely on (gasp!) store bought loaves! I recall how my mother poked her head into the kitchen upon hearing the laughter of her then thirteen year old daughter, knowing what her thirteen year old daughter found highly amusing must be something that went against the feminist grain of the 1980's. Then, upon discovering that Betty Crocker was shaming her daughter - and everyone else who ever opened the cookbook to that recipe - she laughed and explained to me that the expression "day-old bread" - meaning something that is still good but not as good as it once was - could be taken literally in the case of day-old bread and once upon a time women were expected to do the baking at least twice a week. I remember smiling as clarity dawned upon me: This was why my grandmother, a goddess of domesticity, always went to the bakery to buy bread twice a week! Grandma was fighting the power of her generation's cultural expectations.

Flipping through that Betty Crocker cookbook was like taking a trip in a time machine into a world I never knew existed. I learned that recipes called for room-temperature butter because it is nearly impossible to cream cold butter by hand (even though cookies bake up so much lighter and fluffier when you use cold butter!); electric mixers were a luxury back then. I learned that gravy was a staple dressing because meats were cooked to the point of dryness in order to ensure food-borne bacteria would not be a threat. And I learned that women were expected to place the gastric pleasure of their husbands at the top of their goals for a successful marriage. (Back then, the way to a man's heart was through his stomach - in more ways than one. How many men of a certain era died too young from heart disease due to high cholesterol?).

As I bake bread today (wheat, not white!), I think about the societal changes that have occurred since the Greatest Generation were actively parenting their Boomer children...and I wonder what Generation Alpha, still yet to be conceived, will one day think of my cookbook collection.