The joy and letdown of baking bread at home – Joe Bennett

The idea of home-baked bread is often better than the reality. Photo /123RF

Disappointment is the stuff of life. And it’s fertile literary ground. “Life offers,” said Thomas Hardy, “to deny.” So let’s make a little disappointment together. Let’s bake bread.

Like everyone I started baking bread during Covid. And like almost everyone I stopped again soon afterwards. Because the bread I made was never as good as the bread I imagined. And no loaf came close to living up to the smell it made when baking.

(To be fair, few foods do. Evelyn Waugh’s ideal meal consisted of dishes wafted past the nose one after the other, leaving the diner always on the cusp of gratification, but never disappointed.)

The smell of baking bread goes back to hunter-gatherers. The hunters were the blokes, of course, who liked the look-at-me heroics of bringing home the bacon. Meanwhile the women just got on with gathering the stuff that kept them all alive. Among that stuff were the seeds of certain grasses that they ground into a flour.

The word lady is Anglo-Saxon for kneader of the loaf. An Anglo-Saxon loaf was made of flour, yeast, water and salt. So is ours. Let’s start.

Put a bit of sugar in a bit of warm water and stir in a sachet of instant yeast. This isn’t necessary, because instant yeast works fine if stirred in dry, but there is pleasure to be had in witnessing a resurrection.

Yeast in a sachet is a hibernating bear. Sugar and warm water act like spring. When bubbles form you know you’ve brought the bear back to life. And in a few hours’ time you’re going to bake it dead. That’s cooking for keeps.

For the relative proportions of flour and salt and water, there are a thousand recipes on the internet all promising the perfect loaf. Choose one and add a pinch of scepticism. It will serve you well.

Stir all ingredients together with a wooden spoon. When the shaft of the spoon snaps the mixing’s done. We’ve got what bakers call a shaggy dough. Shaggy looks about as promising as it sounds.

We’ll cover the bowl with a tea-towel and put it on the highest bookshelf in the living room where the log-burner is going night and day. Now you go your way and I’ll go mine and we’ll reconvene in an hour.

The hour is done and you can smell that the yeast’s been working. Peel back the tea-towel and the dough has changed from shaggy to something smoother, larger and alive. Wet your fingers, slide them down the side of the dough and raise a handful. Feel it stretch then fold it over. Turn the bowl and do it again. Do it half a dozen times for the pleasure of the handling, then shelve the bowl for another hour and do it all again.

The third hour is the witching hour. Put a lidded casserole into the oven and turn the temperature up to the end of the dial. You want that oven humming like Chernobyl. You want it cherry-red. You want it pulsing.

Turn the dough out on to a floured board. With floured fingers, puddle it, fold it, knead it. Feel the elasticity you’ve made, the living organism. Then roll it into a ball on a piece of baking paper and put it back into the bowl and on to the shelf to rise again.

Open the oven when it reaches the point that you are scared of it. If the heat blisters your face, it’s good to go. With your nuclear oven mitts take the lid off the casserole and drop the risen dough in, baking paper and all. Replace the lid, close the oven and breathe again.

Soon the kitchen will fill with the smell that real estate agents use to sell houses. After half an hour take the lid off the casserole. Spend the next 10 minutes imagining the loaf you want, a loaf as good as it smells. Picture the crust that crackles, the crumb as light as air.

Turn your loaf on to a wire rack. It will look good. It may even crackle a bit. You will feel some pride. But by the time it has cooled enough for you to cut a slice it will already have dulled and shrunk a bit. It will be denser than you’d hoped. Butter it, chew it and be honest. It’s bread. It’s reasonably nice bread, but it’s not great bread. It’s not the bread you imagined. It’s not transcendent bread. It’s a disappointment. Again.

“Between the idea

And the reality,”

wrote TS Eliot, who must surely have been a baker,

“Between the conception

And the creation …

Falls the Shadow”.