The Bread Head Comes Late to the Party

I've become obsessed with baking bread, or to be honest, reading about baking bread.

A fulfilled Christmas request for a pizza stone got me interested in finding the perfect pizza recipe and method. I discovered Peter Reinhart's American Pie, with its fabulous recipe for Neopolitan pizza. That successful undertaking got me thinking about bread, which got me reading about bread and vowing to bake a loaf of bread every week.

I ordered books from the library and Amazon and revisited forgotten bread bibles from my ever-growing collection of cookbooks, becoming a late night grain anthropologist. This of course is nothing compared to author William Alexander, who in his new book 52 Loaves describes becoming so obsessed with making the perfect loaf of bread that he grew (and threshed) his own wheat.

But I'm not obsessed, I've always been an inveterate recipe tester and now I'm curious about how different breads fit different moods. And so followed Oatmeal Buttermilk Bread, Oatmeal Maple Bread, Simple Crusty Bread, a garden variety whole wheat bread, a break from bread baking for a while when we went to Hawaii for my mother's funeral and then caught up on life once we returned, Julia Child's baguette recipe and tonight, the basic whole wheat bread from the Tassajara Bread Book, published in 1970.

Everything old is new again. To be honest, the bread tastes kind of 1970ish, whole grain and a bit bland in a good for you sort of way, though with good butter and apricot jam it modernizes very nicely. I'm calling it Zen Bread (in honor of the Tassajara Monastery where it was born) and have decided that it is stripped of all pretense, just bread plain and simple and who could ask for anything more, especially when the house smells so good. Anyway, I'm kind of nostalgic for the innocence of the '70s sometimes and just the other day we were reminiscing about avocado and cheese sandwiches with alfalfa sprouts.

The best part of cooking is sharing the bounty. One of the four loaves I baked tonight will go to our neighbors as a peace offering for overrunning their yard during a boisterous Ocho de Mayo party. Another will go to a dear friend who is about to under chemotherapy and who will probably appreciate a little Zen. And two loaves will remain with us, so my home can feel wholesome and there will be something special to offer the kids, one of whom seems to be starving all the time.

But is it hot in here or is it me? I can't tell if suddenly everyone is obsessed with baking bread or if I'm just more attuned to other bread heads now. When I started writing mommy essays eleven years ago, it seemed as if everyone was doing it. Ditto memoirs with food, stories about caring for aging parents and memoirs about spending a year doing something. Blogs? By the time I convinced myself (a few months ago) that blogs can actually be a good thing because they bypass the publishing gatekeepers and allow writing to be read, I discovered that blogs are passe. If it can't be said within Twitter's 140 characters then...

You reach a point in mid-life where you have to come to grips with the things you won't accomplish, the places you will never visit, the experiences you may never have outside of your armchair.

But, as Oprah would say, this I know for sure: There are levains and bigas and poolish in my future as I get ready to leave the world of simple sponge behind and make and feed my own bread starter. It won't make me famous, it might make me fat, but it will give me a sense of accomplishment within the four walls of my kitchen. It might even make a few other people happy too.

And if I get too caught up in the fact that everyone else is already making ciabatta and Turkish flat bread and somebody probably has a book deal about the year they spent making these and 50 other breads, then I guess I'll always have my good old dependable Zen bread to keep me grounded.