What PBS Taught Me About Our Daily Bread

Baking has been on my mind a lot lately, thanks to several holidays. This month I've made Irish soda bread and Pi day apple pie on a whim. I've also been trying my hand at yeast bread. One of my Christmas gifts was Gluten Free Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, and I spent a couple snow days testing it out.

The good news is, you don't have to knead gluten free bread dough; assembly is like making brownies. The bad news is that title is a lie. It really means "In 5 minutes of active prep time, after you spent 2.5 hours the day before weighing flours and bringing the dough to a slow rise. And then you have to bake it for an hour. So yeah, carve out some time."

After all that weighing, mixing, and waiting, the results have been surprisingly delicious, although not practical for sandwiches. My loaves still aren't perfect, though. The dough is too dense, the rise too low, the crust too tough. I keep thinking about what I should do differently next time. Should I add less water? Does my pie crust need a higher fat content?

My first attempt at artisan bread. 

Still, I think all my experimenting has helped me understand the process better, even if that batch of bagels turned out flat and lumpy. While visiting my in-laws in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, I went back to the old puzzle of king cake. I attempted it several times the year we got engaged, but I never matched the Haydel's cakes the Southern Baron grew up on. This year, though, I took a long look and a light bulb went off. Eureka, it's a brioche! I just have to make a sweet bread dough enriched with eggs.

The same day as my king cake epiphany, we ended up watching the Great British Baking Show while we waited for Downton Abbey to air. I thought I was over baking competition shows - how much drama can you manufacture out of cupcake decoration anyway? But this show was different. The contestants were doing some serious, complicated stuff involving lots of rising time.

I ended up glued to the screen in suspense, hoping each person would have long enough to proof their dough AND bake it completely. Will the doughnuts puff up enough? Will the layered swirls of the Croatian coffeecake maintain their integrity? Will the fruit bread be raw in the center? (Spoiler alert: it was.) Even though the bakers had the luxury of a personal Kitchen Aid mixer plus a fancy proofing drawer (which I covet), their work was still a delicate balance of math and luck. If they didn't plan out everything perfectly, the results would be messy.

You have to assemble your flours before you make the dough.  

All this baked good suspense made me think about how we pray to God for "our daily bread." It sounds like the most basic, bland food. Sure, bread and milk are what everyone runs to get in a snow storm, but they aren't super exciting. But the actual process of making bread is a complicated scientific reaction.  If any factor goes wrong, it won't work. A round, fluffy loaf is actually kind of a miracle. It's appropriate that the Passover "bread of haste" is bread that doesn't bother to be leavened.

Daily life can feel like a maddening balance too. My routine is a pile of deadlines dependent on each other. I must leave the house no later than 7:32 am, or I'll miss the train. If I don't put my phone in airplane mode while I'm underground on the subway, the battery will drain to nothing. A letter template must be formatted perfectly, or the 250 letters I'm mailing will look terrible. 

Just as the Father wants to give us the food we need to live, we can also ask Him to give us success in our daily tasks so that life rises into a cohesive whole. The unleavened bread of Passover and the Eucharist symbolizes taking time away from the rat race demands of the everyday. We put aside complicated dough proofing so we can focus on heavenly things instead.