My Love Affair With Bread

It's a thing.

I’m trying to remember when I first fell in love with bread, like when I recognized I was head over heels, weak in the knees, heart rate up, that fluttery feeling in my stomach.

I mean, toast, yeah, sure, that process can redeem commercial white bread no matter how bland, but to be honest to have mayo and Velveeta on that cottony bread, as a kid…I mean, it was good, I don’t know what to tell you. Also, cinnamon sugar could turn plain old white bread toast into something sublime.

When I was nine my dad got a consulting gig with a manufacturing company in Sweden, and so he moved my mom and me to Göteborg for nine months. (My two older sisters were in college by then.) And what I remember so clearly is the cardamom scented bread my mom would buy at the bakery around the corner from our apartment and how I’d slather it with unsalted butter and eat nearly the whole loaf myself. It was the first time I’d tasted cardamom. I was wild for it.

That same year we joined a tour group and took the train to Rome for Christmas and in our small hotel every morning a knock would come at the door and two dark-haired young men would come bustling in carrying trays with small silver pots of coffee for my parents and a cold glass of milk for me and a clean white poached egg and a hard roll along with a pat of butter. I liked eggs. The milk was fine. But I swooned over that hard roll, the perfect crunch outside and the almost-hollow inside with feathery wisps of bread, and one was not enough so that each morning my mom might have saved hers to give me later. I still dream about those hard rolls. Golly.

My mom didn’t bake a lot of bread. Sometimes she’d make whole wheat, and I didn’t really care for it as a kid. For some reason, that was something my palate had to grow into.

When my kids were little I got into a bread-baking spree. I baked bread with cooked bulgur, which was a gorgeous dense thing that begged for butter and homemade jam, and I baked whole wheat bread and white bread, all in loaf pans because it didn’t occur to me to do anything else.

Once I tried to make a starter for salt rising bread, which if you’ve never had it, I’m sorry for you. When I was young and we’d visit my grandparents in Louisville, Kentucky, we’d always make sure to visit Heitzman’s Bakery for some salt rising bread and one each of a peach kuchen and a butter kuchen. The bakery is still in business, but there’s no more kuchen or salt rising bread. I liked it best toasted. It tasted like cheese toast, thin, crunchy slices with butter melting into it.

The starter for salt rising bread is basically potato peels and baking soda and a bit of sugar and salt, and you’re supposed to prep that the night before you want to bake, so it has to ferment in a warm place. I put it in the oven in our tiny kitchen and set the oven on low, and in the morning our apartment stunk so bad, like maybe a bunch of basketball players had snuck in and deposited their sweaty jock straps in our kitchen after a particularly hard game, so I had to toss the potato mixture out in the back yard and open all the windows. That was so traumatizing, I never tried it again.

During Covid, I got on the sourdough kick. I had just moved to Albuquerque and signed a rental lease on an adorable little place near UNM literally weeks before the pandemic hit. I lived alone, and besides writing each day to finish my memoir, I took to cooking like a madwoman, and bread baking became part of that furious flurry.

I made my first sourdough starter and set it on the counter as instructed, and in a couple of days noticed it was starting to bubble nicely and then noticed it was bubbling around a plump dead cockroach. Gah. After a visit from an exterminator — las cucarachas in Albuquerque were a little too cheeky for me — I tried again. This time, success and the birth of a robust starter I named Big Guy and the onset of regular online orders of 30 lbs. of flour, and after a year or so I mastered being a beginner at sourdough baking.

I made sourdough baguettes and boules and gave away cups of starter and gifted loaves to friends and kept ordering more flour.

When I was preparing to move back to North Carolina in 2022, I dried Big Guy on some parchment paper and carried my sourdough habit (read: obsession) with me and reconstituted some of the dried starter, and I now have a combination of New Mexico and North Carolina yeastbeasties that have materialized out of thin air, and this starter I call Wild Thing. I don’t know, every time it still seems like a little bit of a miracle to me.

Additions I’ve played with:

• dried cranberries and chopped walnuts

• finely grated parmesan

• dill seed and grated onion

• small cubes of cheddar and thin slices of jalapeño

• roasted garlic and sliced kalamata olives

What I’m saying is, this “me and bread” thing is probably a permanent situation.

Evidence of bread baking goes back thousands of years, with the discovery of charred breadcrumbs in Jordan that date back 14,000 years. Apparently, we have the Egyptians to thank for being the first to use yeast in leavening bread (around 3000 BCE). It’s likely their beer-making came first, using yeast to ferment their brew, and historians think yeast in bread dough could have been a happy accident, like maybe the unleavened dough for flatbread sat for too long and the familiar bubbly magic just happened. Can you imagine that moment?

Babu waves wildly. “OMG! Amun! Get over here and look at this!”

Amun strides over and gapes at the dough, inhales the heady aroma, looks at Babu, grins, bobs his head and murmurs, “Far freakin’ out, man.”

And the world would never be the same.