On Making Bread

There is something uniquely cathartic about kneading bread. What begins as a puddle of flour and water becomes bread only through the process of kneading, of stretching and folding dough over itself, of running your fingers along the side of the bowl until no flour sticks.

Bread is perhaps our most universal thing and its components, flour and water, our most fundamental. At a time when everyone is sheltering in their respective place, bread, and the process by which it is made, remains unwaveringly global. Although it emerges in different forms, each of which represent a host of heritage, bread always begins as that same puddle of flour and water. I think about this every time I am kneading my own bread, sheltering in my own place just outside of Boston.

“Breaking bread”, a euphemism for having a meal together; “bread and butter”, referring to the basics in life; “breadwinner”, a person who earns money to support a family. Bread, in its many essences, for its many idioms, is also the thing I take most for granted. I have started making bread in quarantine in part because I thought it would be a good use of my time and also because, if this pandemic has taught me anything it is that things can seldom if ever, be taken for granted. “Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant'“. (Joan Didion, Blue Nights)

Making my own bread is, in a way, an exercise not only in catharsis, but also an exercise in gratitude. What has become clear is that even something as seemingly universal and essential as bread requires copious amounts of time and care. (This was especially clear after my first attempt at making sourdough bread went completely awry.) Making bread is a fragile. And the things that bread stands for are just as fragile. We take bread, among other things, for granted often because we don’t understand what goes into the process of their becoming. Once we are able to understand how precarious things really are, even the simplest of things, we start to have a better appreciation for their existence. Making bread has given me this, I hope it can bring you the same.

I used the following guide to making sourdough bread from the New York Times.

making sourdough

bread