HALF A RECIPE WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS OR INGREDIENTS

With the work mostly over I’m a little high, it comes from getting caught up in the ascent.

I made a couple loaves today, they’re sleeping in the refrigerator. They’re twins from one recipe that yields two. It’s a recipe I developed for my book and it’s one of the few I feel solid about so far - scalded whole wheat with toasted walnuts. Nothing fancy and that’s the point. I added too much water then mixed it for a long time by hand, more than ten minutes. I took a break or two in the process but I’m still feeling it in my wrists tonight, which are making occasional little clicking sounds as I type. I made one loaf for the family and one for a meeting I’m having with a stranger tomorrow. I gave the dough a lot of myself at the outset because I have high standards for the bread that I bake for other people, especially ones I’m just getting to know and who may have only one loaf by which to remember - judge - me forever (it’s all ego). If I’m just baking for myself I will do crude things, usually in the name of thrift or foolish curiosity. Not today.

The dough was wet and heavy. All stoneground whole wheat, thirsty, with perfectly roasted really chunky walnuts that had been just barely crushed in my fists. I had sifted out a lot of the bran and soaked it in hot water to soften it up, like a pair of worn-out feet before scrubbing. Otherwise bran is sharp. You never think about how sharp an ingredient like bran or the little birdbrain of a walnut is until you throw some into a fragile matrix and watch it slice through the web like a knife. I added my revived bran in on the first fold, spreading it over the top of the dough and tucking it around the edges. It gets comfortable but never fully reassimilates. The walnuts went in on the second fold and they toppled all over the bowl and spilled out in a moat around the dough, unwilling to be totally caught, but then they dispersed themselves throughout it evenly over the next two folds like I knew they would. The dough was strong, it held them.

I had to pick my son up from school midday unexpectedly - sick, again - so I did the last fold four minutes early. A negligible pivot, against the odds things were working out okay. I left the dough at my studio in a spot that wasn’t too warm. Who knew where the day would take me. Eventually I returned with my kid asleep in the backseat of the car, still running. I’m always on borrowed time with him strapped in like that, so I ran inside quickly and grabbed the bowl of dough and brought it topless straight to the car, then balanced it on my son’s backpack that was sitting on the passenger seat. I drove us all home. We got to the house and I woke my guy up and he hates waking up, every time it’s as if I’m jolting him into a nightmare he thought he’d finally skirted out of. He takes forever to come to, to calm down. I try not to dwell on this in general.

I put the bowl, still topless, on top of the car, and picked him up. He was inconsolable, so I had to carry him into the house. Now, he’s a huge child, the size of a five year old at least but just newly three. Distressed children are heavier than happier ones. I’m holding him on my hip with my arm under his big baby body and all his bags and my bags, always so much stuff, are just hanging off my shoulders, and I am holding the naked bowl full of dough in my other hand, straight out towards the house like some kind of toxic shepherd, but at an awkward angle because that’s how forearms in perpetual imbalance work. For no reason at all, it feels strange to me to have dough out in the elements like this. I’m watching it ooze to one side of the bowl, wondering if we will all make it to the door in our intended shapes. Anyway, we do.

I put the dough on the counter and get absolutely trapped beneath my son on the couch for at least thirty minutes. At this point a schedule for the bread is no longer a concern or an option. I manage to unearth myself because it’s now that I allow my child his first tv show ever - it’s the Family Guy holiday special, because the hulu app is terminally unusable and Fantasia, my respectable intended gateway to screen time, was trapped inside of it. He melts into the sensorial overwhelm and I sneak to the kitchen, do a preshape on the dough, and set a long timer. The dough is a little cold from its trip so I figured I bought myself some time. It looks good after the preshape, it’s so strong. It was that extra long hand mix that I almost quit but then decided to go whole hog on instead - I really worked it. You basically can’t overmix a dough by hand, so I had just kept it going until my will gave out.

The walnuts are poking up like fat mountains on the Little Prince’s planet, proportionately very large for their sphere. The skin isn’t breaking, they’re almost all fully sheathed. That’s how I know it’s gonna be good. A hand mix on a wet whole wheat dough doesn’t always make it easy, and I start getting that feeling. I recognize it to be anticipation, hope, and fear. I now have as much to lose as I have to gain.

I leave the rounds for 30 or 45 minutes, I’m not sure. The timer goes off and I can’t get to them. I’m now home alone with two babies, and it’s dinner time. Eventually I find my hands to myself and I do two final shapes on the breads with a pause between them to save a child toppling out of a chair. The shaping is good, I’ve been baking nonstop the last few months and I’m feeling fluent in it again. I also know this dough, and we like each other. I put the loaves to bed in a couple of bannetons, then use my little plastic fridge thermometer to find the spot with the right temp. This past summer I spent two weeks thinking I’d forgotten entirely how to bake, only to realize that my fridge was running 15 degrees hotter in my parking spot than it should have been, and every loaf was overproofing. Tools really are there to help. Tonight, the first spot I choose registers 50F at a three minute check-in - much too hot - the second is at 46F. Still high. I keep moving them around until I find a spot at 39F - perfect. Nothing is ever guaranteed, especially success, and I am too invested now to leave this up to chance.

I can’t stop looking at the loaves, finding excuses to open the fridge and share a glance. I always rest my loaves uncovered and this makes them easy to spy on, I can get a quick fix. They stay on my mind all night, as I make pasta, wipe asses, put two children to bed. I keep forgetting what I’m looking forward to, what this welcome prick of lightness is, but I feel a kind of quiet momentum. Then I remember it’s just the bread. I consider going to sleep early so that I can get to baking it sooner, a child’s thought.

If the bread doesn’t bake as I think and, more weightedly, as I hope it will, my day tomorrow will be genuinely worse for it. I don’t handle these things well. A failure or even a slightly subpar bake will make me question everything. But if all goes according to plan (according to hope) I will float through the rest of my day, all the edges rounded. That’s the itch, that’s the scratch. The only thing that matters in the end anyway is the feeling.