Anadama bread is a highly appropriate first bread for my project. The Ur-Anadama bread comes from The Loaf and Ladle in Exeter, NH, the town where I was born and where I lived until I went away to college in Chicago, ditching quaint small town life for the big city. I’m not currently sure about that decision, but it was made eighteen years ago--half a lifetime, now--and neither you nor I can change the past.
So. I loved The Loaf and Ladle, and I especially loved its Anadama bread. Anadama bread is brown, and sprinkled with rough cornmeal. It is heavy, in the manner of a good whole wheat bread, but not dense. It has a beautiful soft, even crumb. (The crumb is the interior of the bread, and especially its texture. Yes, I am talking like a baker now, but long before I knew the word “crumb” I admired it in this bread, so I’m pulling out the correct terminology.)
The fact is that I’ve never had Anadama bread from any other bakery. It’s a New England thing, and I’m not up that way much anymore. My parents still live there, but they make me angry and sad. To me, then, The Loaf and Ladle’s Anadama bread is not only the Platonic ideal of Anadama bread; it is the only Anadama bread.
Which may explain why I’ve been so dissatisfied with my own efforts at making it. Though I can’t discount the fact that my own efforts have not been very great successes so far, at least before yesterday, so I suspect that’s been only half the problem. The other half was that I wasn’t baking very good bread.
To teach myself to bake bread, I started with a book. This comes naturally to me, as I love books. The book I have started with is The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, by Peter Reinhart. There are other books that I plan to explore as well, notably Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson (and his soon-to-be-released Tartine Bread No. 3, which is supposedly going to take on whole grain bread!), but this one was available at the library and came recommended by Michael Pollan in his excellent book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, so it seemed like a good start.
I also feel that The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is a great title for my first teacher, because it describes exactly what I want to be: an apprentice. I am learning a skill, a trade, a craft, and in order to do so I must apprentice myself to a master. I don’t have the time to apprentice myself to an actual baker, even if I could find one to take me, and I don’t have either the time or money to go to culinary school, so I’m doing this the way I know how: through book learning. I’m going to teach my hands to bake bread from the pages of a book.
I know this sounds all wrong, but I actually expect it to go swimmingly. I’ve always been excellent at learning from books. We’ll find out together if I’m right!
Anadama bread is also, of course, first in a book arranged alphabetically, which is also why it’s the first bread I bake under Reinhart’s instruction. The name Anadama, in case you were wondering, is entirely apocryphal in its origins, but the most common story is that there was a Massachusetts man whose wife left him, and, what was more, left behind only some cornmeal mush and molasses for his dinner. This fine gentleman is supposed to have slung together the mush and molasses with flour and yeast, to make a bread for his supper, all the while muttering, “Anna, damn her!”
So. I loved The Loaf and Ladle, and I especially loved its Anadama bread. Anadama bread is brown, and sprinkled with rough cornmeal. It is heavy, in the manner of a good whole wheat bread, but not dense. It has a beautiful soft, even crumb. (The crumb is the interior of the bread, and especially its texture. Yes, I am talking like a baker now, but long before I knew the word “crumb” I admired it in this bread, so I’m pulling out the correct terminology.)
The fact is that I’ve never had Anadama bread from any other bakery. It’s a New England thing, and I’m not up that way much anymore. My parents still live there, but they make me angry and sad. To me, then, The Loaf and Ladle’s Anadama bread is not only the Platonic ideal of Anadama bread; it is the only Anadama bread.
Which may explain why I’ve been so dissatisfied with my own efforts at making it. Though I can’t discount the fact that my own efforts have not been very great successes so far, at least before yesterday, so I suspect that’s been only half the problem. The other half was that I wasn’t baking very good bread.
To teach myself to bake bread, I started with a book. This comes naturally to me, as I love books. The book I have started with is The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, by Peter Reinhart. There are other books that I plan to explore as well, notably Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson (and his soon-to-be-released Tartine Bread No. 3, which is supposedly going to take on whole grain bread!), but this one was available at the library and came recommended by Michael Pollan in his excellent book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, so it seemed like a good start.
I also feel that The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is a great title for my first teacher, because it describes exactly what I want to be: an apprentice. I am learning a skill, a trade, a craft, and in order to do so I must apprentice myself to a master. I don’t have the time to apprentice myself to an actual baker, even if I could find one to take me, and I don’t have either the time or money to go to culinary school, so I’m doing this the way I know how: through book learning. I’m going to teach my hands to bake bread from the pages of a book.
I know this sounds all wrong, but I actually expect it to go swimmingly. I’ve always been excellent at learning from books. We’ll find out together if I’m right!
I’m not kidding. That’s actually the story. The phrase was, of course, shortened and nicened up into Anadama.
I’ve read some variant on this tale in every Anadama bread recipe I’ve ever seen, and the thing that’s always ticked me off about it is the idea that this grouchy guy could simply throw together these four ingredients and get something delicious enough to not only make again, but actually give a name to. Because I’ve meticulously followed plenty of recipes, and been woefully underimpressed with the results.
I was hopeful that this time would be different.
One main thing that gave me this hope was the presence of the “soaker”--you mix the cornmeal and water and let them soak overnight at room temperature. Corn is a sweet grain, full of sugars, and the long soak helps to break down the complex carbohydrate starches and free the sugars, adding depth to the flavor.
I did it: I mixed together the cornmeal and water. I didn’t have the coarse ground cornmeal called for in the recipe, however, so I used fine. And I was, on Saturday night, already planning to halve the recipe. It would make two 1 ½-pound loaves or three 1-pound loaves, and we were leaving town for the weekend on Thursday. I didn’t want any of my precious bread to go to waste. Plus, I only own one loaf pan, in the 1-pound loaf size.
I know, I gotta invest in some loaf pans. But this is what I currently have in the house.
So I make half of a soaker, covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and went to bed well pleased with myself.
The next day, when Zoe went down for her nap, I got down to business. I had added up the various stages, and I figured that if I started at noon, we could have bread with dinner at around 6 pm.
Baking bread is not for a person in a hurry.
So there I was at step 2, making the dough, stirring together, as the recipe said, 2 cups of flour, the yeast, soaker, and water in the biggest bowl I owned. The I covered the bowl and let it ferment for an hour.
Step 3 had me add the remaining 2 ½ cups of flour, the salt, molasses, and shortening, and stir it all into a soft sticky ball.
This was the moment when I realized that I had not been halving the ingredients.
I muttered a few choice expletives and considered my options, then shrugged. I stirred together some more cornmeal and water, then dumped that into the bowl and mixed it all together. The lovely natural sugars in that half cup of cornmeal would remain less broken down than their soaked brethren, but there was nothing to be done about that now.
And it was time to knead. This is the part of bread baking that I have always outsourced, to a bread machine, a mixer, or a professional baker. Kneading is hard work, and it takes time. The recipe claimed it would take about 10 minutes to achieve the “firm but supple and pliable and definitely not sticky” dough that would pass the “windowpane test” (stretch a small piece of dough and see if you can make it translucent thin without tearing) and register 77 to 81 degrees F. It took me closer to 15, but I was paranoid about under-kneading, and not too worried about over-kneading.
I kneaded, sprinkling flour liberally on the counter and the bread, turning and folding and pressing the bread, developing the gluten with the force of my arms. It was exercise. Today not only my arms, but my pecs and, unexpectedly, my stomach muscles as well, are all noticeably sore. I clearly have to work on my kneading muscles.
Wash the bowl, oil it lightly, and nestle my well-kneaded dough inside. Cover it and let it ferment and rise again, until it doubles in size, about an hour and a half.
Then finally, Zoe now up and about and curious as to what was taking mama from her, I shaped the loaves. This is where my lack of loaf pans came into play. I couldn’t follow the instructions, because I didn’t have the equipment.
Now yes, I understand how absurd it is for me to set out on a project to bake bread without the necessary equipment. In an ideal world I would have bought multiple loaf pans of every size and description, a baker’s peel, a baking stone, bread flour, rye flour, stone ground flours to compare to the regular grocery-store versions, and an industrial bread oven.
Not going to happen. At least not today. And not yesterday, either.
There are a lot of people who love to cook but who claim that baking makes them nervous. Too precise, they say. They like to be able to wing it.
I have never really had this concern. I do wing it with baking, at least some of the time. When the occasion calls for it. As, for example, when I forget that I was originally going to halve the recipe and hurriedly have to mix up some unsoaked soaker in order to get the proportions right. Or when I use a different grind of cornmeal than called for, because it’s what I have in the house.
Or when I make batards, because I don’t have the correct loaf pans.
I was assisted with this brain wave by the fact that Anadama bread from The Loaf and Ladle isn’t baked in loaf pans, but comes in huge brown torpedos: or batards, as I had now learned to call them. And fortunately, Reinhart includes batards as the second of fifteen various bread shapes that he instructs the reader in creating, with useful pictures.
I did my best. I shaped two batards. This was actually, to me, the most nerve wracking part of the process, because of these words, which begin the lesson, “without degassing the piece of dough…” I had to try to cut and manipulate two heavy hunks of dough without causing them to deflate and lose all the lovely bubbles of carbon dioxide that the yeast had been merrily excreting as they devoured sugars. If I degassed the dough, my bread would be leaden, not risen. Not really bread at all.
The second batard came out nicer looking than the first, but I consider that to be the normal order of things.
Now just one last rise, or proof, as this is called, for a final hour or hour and a half. I was starting to eye the clock anxiously. It was nearly 3:30, and if the proofing lasted until 5:00, and then the bread baked until 6, we wouldn’t get to have it with dinner, or at least not with Zoe’s dinner.
Having a toddler makes dinnertime arrive at a strict and very early hour, and as often as possible we try to eat together, as a family. Not least because otherwise I often end up eating two dinners, one with Zoe and one with Nick, and it is very easy to overeat in these circumstances.
I proofed the bread for an hour, and decided that, were it in loaf pans, it would have “crest[ed] fully above the tops of the pans.”
I gave the plant mister a hurried wash before spritzing the loaves all over with a delicate sheen of water, and popped them in the preheated oven. The water is supposed to simulate the blast of steam that a professional oven delivers. The steam delays the rate at which the starches in the bread heat, absorb liquid, burst, and ultimately clarify. This is the process by which dough turns into bread, and also what gives good bread what Reinhart calls “a clear, cool, and clean mouth feel.” I wanted this to happen, obviously, very much, but first I needed the bread to get a good “oven spring” -- that final leap upwards that comes when the air in each tiny hole in the bread expands, and the nicely developed gluten stretches to form the distinctive airy pattern and texture that is bread.
Then I left it alone. I was occupied keeping Zoe away from the oven, which gets awfully hot, and so I couldn’t obsess over my loaves, much as I wanted to simply turn the oven light on and watch them bake. Instead, I sang the alphabet song over and over, and helped build block towers. It was all very soothing.
My bread was completely beautiful, if a bit misshapen.
I was assisted with this brain wave by the fact that Anadama bread from The Loaf and Ladle isn’t baked in loaf pans, but comes in huge brown torpedos: or batards, as I had now learned to call them. And fortunately, Reinhart includes batards as the second of fifteen various bread shapes that he instructs the reader in creating, with useful pictures.
I did my best. I shaped two batards. This was actually, to me, the most nerve wracking part of the process, because of these words, which begin the lesson, “without degassing the piece of dough…” I had to try to cut and manipulate two heavy hunks of dough without causing them to deflate and lose all the lovely bubbles of carbon dioxide that the yeast had been merrily excreting as they devoured sugars. If I degassed the dough, my bread would be leaden, not risen. Not really bread at all.
The second batard came out nicer looking than the first, but I consider that to be the normal order of things.
Now just one last rise, or proof, as this is called, for a final hour or hour and a half. I was starting to eye the clock anxiously. It was nearly 3:30, and if the proofing lasted until 5:00, and then the bread baked until 6, we wouldn’t get to have it with dinner, or at least not with Zoe’s dinner.
Having a toddler makes dinnertime arrive at a strict and very early hour, and as often as possible we try to eat together, as a family. Not least because otherwise I often end up eating two dinners, one with Zoe and one with Nick, and it is very easy to overeat in these circumstances.
I proofed the bread for an hour, and decided that, were it in loaf pans, it would have “crest[ed] fully above the tops of the pans.”
I gave the plant mister a hurried wash before spritzing the loaves all over with a delicate sheen of water, and popped them in the preheated oven. The water is supposed to simulate the blast of steam that a professional oven delivers. The steam delays the rate at which the starches in the bread heat, absorb liquid, burst, and ultimately clarify. This is the process by which dough turns into bread, and also what gives good bread what Reinhart calls “a clear, cool, and clean mouth feel.” I wanted this to happen, obviously, very much, but first I needed the bread to get a good “oven spring” -- that final leap upwards that comes when the air in each tiny hole in the bread expands, and the nicely developed gluten stretches to form the distinctive airy pattern and texture that is bread.
Then I left it alone. I was occupied keeping Zoe away from the oven, which gets awfully hot, and so I couldn’t obsess over my loaves, much as I wanted to simply turn the oven light on and watch them bake. Instead, I sang the alphabet song over and over, and helped build block towers. It was all very soothing.
My bread was completely beautiful, if a bit misshapen.
I hadn’t tucked the seam of the batards under quite firmly enough, and as they sprang upwards, a side bubble of bread puckered out on each loaf.
The worst waiting is the cooling. Reinhart is very clear about the importance of cooling, and I was resolved to let my loaves get down to room temperature before cutting them. I was resolved, at least, until we sat down to dinner, and then I promptly cut into one.
The worst waiting is the cooling. Reinhart is very clear about the importance of cooling, and I was resolved to let my loaves get down to room temperature before cutting them. I was resolved, at least, until we sat down to dinner, and then I promptly cut into one.
It was--very good. Not quite excellent. Not The Loaf and Ladle good. But a whole lot better than any other loaf of bread, Anadama or otherwise, that I’d ever baked. I wanted it to be a little denser, to have a deeper flavor (maybe if I’d actually soaked the entire soaker?). And I wanted a crisper crust (crusts are notoriously difficult to get right in a home oven).
But overall, I was so happy. Out of just a few basic items that I keep in my pantry, I had made bread. That is what I find, fundamentally, so satisfying about baking. The way it turns what appears to be nothing--flour, yeast, water, a little butter, some molasses--into wonderful warm food. Cooking is no less miraculous, but the ingredients by themselves look like so much more: gorgeous bright vegetables and red hunks of meat, pans of shining grains and gleaming bottles of oil. You can tell that those will make a fine meal. Flour, by contrast, lacks promise, when you first look at it: a powder that ranges from white to dusty brown to darkly speckled. From that, and from some tiny, sugar-hungry fungi, we manage to produce bread.
But overall, I was so happy. Out of just a few basic items that I keep in my pantry, I had made bread. That is what I find, fundamentally, so satisfying about baking. The way it turns what appears to be nothing--flour, yeast, water, a little butter, some molasses--into wonderful warm food. Cooking is no less miraculous, but the ingredients by themselves look like so much more: gorgeous bright vegetables and red hunks of meat, pans of shining grains and gleaming bottles of oil. You can tell that those will make a fine meal. Flour, by contrast, lacks promise, when you first look at it: a powder that ranges from white to dusty brown to darkly speckled. From that, and from some tiny, sugar-hungry fungi, we manage to produce bread.
Welcome back to blogging Nadine! I loved reading this, it's delightfully suspenseful. :) I often start by halving a recipe and then forget halfway through. Good times...
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