When we first moved out here, far from the urban sprawl, I soon found that bakeries were scarce and I began to sorely miss fresh-baked bread. I felt the same way then about mass-produced loaves as Julia Child who once asked, “How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” So I checked out a few recipe books and gave bread-baking a try.
After all, something like modern bread was produced 30,000 years ago by cave dwellers. I’d recently had my DNA checked and found I’m almost one percent Neanderthal so I hoped I possessed the necessary ancient instincts.
My first home-baked loaf turned out quite well, not as food, but as a doorstop or a catapult missle. I could have entered it in an amateur art contest with the title, “Seeded Rye Sculpture”. Three more failures almost convinced me to throw in the dough trowel.
My family encouraged my efforts at first, but eventually began to hint they’d like to be replaced by others in the testing group . My son suggested lab rats. One daughter’s chipped bicuspid may have been caused while testing my first marble rye. Little Carolyn told me it felt like she’d bitten a marble.
After discovering an old box of raisins in the back of a kitchen cabinet, I managed to turn out a reasonably edible loaf of raisin bread. As we sat around the kitchen table enyoying the still warm loaf, my wife suddenly shouted, “Everybody stop eating! One of the raisins just crawled out of my slice!
I finally tossed out my loaf pans. My Neanderthal craving for home-baked bread persisted, but I began to get used to the off-the-shelf brands, even deciding on a couple of favorites. Back in the city one day on business, I stopped for lunch in a famous deli and ordered their prize-winning pastrami sandwich. “On what bread, Sir?” the waiter asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered without thinking. “I guess I’ll have it on Wonder Bread.” The manager was summoned and I was asked to leave.
Imagine That 