The Hydra Legend
Hydration. Water. When I was a kid one summer I fell out on a tennis court in the 100 degree Florida sunshine, my body exhausted by the heat and lack of hydration. My childhood was spent at the beach--for this family with five children, the free beaches of Florida were a perfect summer solution. The salt water in that wild Atlantic and its neighbor, the sleepy Gulf of Mexico, always in my imagination housed Hydra--the mythical beast who grew two heads back whenever one was chopped off.
Getting dough right feels like that for me, in part by design. Feeling my way to a right tackiness, to a certain moisture, to a taut surface on a shaped loaf--the beast of time and environment, ambient humidity and temperature, the absorption qualities in the flour . . . corrections made to one informs conditions in the others. The dance is confusing, hilarious, rewarding. The process is a perfect example how mastery cannot be taught, only learned. And for me, anyway, learning is slow.
The breads I am making right now are really tricking me in the Hydra moment. One day I will get a great spring, a big, bulbous loaf. The very next day the same dough with an additional day in the fridge will spring OUT and make a two inch tall disc -- still delicious, still rich with big lovely cells in the crumb . . . but not big and bulbous -- and this is a matter of wet dough, is it not? I wrestle with it, try multiple sprays through the early bake to keep it very wet -- and sacrificing oven temp every time I open that door! Hydra strikes again!
One of the comments on my first post points out that people have been feeling their way to bread for --well, forever-- that not everyone reaches for their digital scale. So true. And while I do not mean to suggest that any of what I am up to is novel (much time reading this website and its posts show me a world of brilliant adventure far beyond my rejection of teaspoons and scales) it is certainly novel for me, in that humbling way in which it is a beautiful thing to be reminded repeatedly by the Hydra that I am outmatched by breadmaking, outnumbered and outgunned. How lovely to know a lifetime of battling the Hydra awaits -- and that that battle is -- it is -- more like a dance than a fight.
Comments
People have been baking bread without scales for thousands of years, let alone digital scales.
Being able to mix bread and know the dough is the right hydration by it's feel and look is something that I aspire too. Maybe after my 2 or 3rd 1000th loaf?
To be clear, the skill you wish to develop is one I enjoy only when I am baking my daily bread -- it is a loose method, a process, and the ingredients, types of flour, etc, are always in flux. When I am baking a Christmas bread, with nuts and fruit and milk/eggs/sugar . . . the I follow recipes and measure with care.
The daily bread making without measuring has been about using my senses to read the material, and experimenting with time, temperature, etc; you know, playing in the kitchen. I would say I started messing around with that after about 3 years and several hundred loaves of bread from all kinds of books and recipes on this site and others. I vary flours and process but almost never use anything to enrich like eggs or milk, butter, sugar . . . none of that. I think that by controlling the ingredients to just the basic 4 (salt, water, yeast--in this case homegrown sourdough--and flour) I have been able to learn more about the hows and whys of making a good loaf of bread. I'd say I bake on average ten of those a week and give 8 away to friends, neighbors, and students. So, lots of practice. AND YET! I cannot go to the local farmer's market or the bakery a couple of towns over without nearly dying of admiration for the ability others have with breadbaking that dwarfs my own. I usually leave happy: humbled and unhungry.