Self-Taught Lesson #8: The bread formula

Bread is one of our oldest, cross-cultural foods. When fire was invented, shortly after followed bread.

But bread across the world, or across one bakery, can vary extremely.

How do you determine whether a bread rises into the classic rounded loaf, like a sourdough, or whether it stays flatter, like a focaccia? What about sweeter breads, like brioche, compared to chewier and richer breads, challah?

The general formula that I’ve gleaned is this:

flour + liquid + a bit of salt + rising agent = bread

With the real variables being the flour, liquid, and rising agent, there are plenty of iterations of bread to make and explore!

Transforming flour and water into bread is not only something like shaking hands with our history, but it’s also, as every baker discovers, a return to real flavor and a satisfying, meditative process. — The Joy of Cooking, 2019 edition

What is yeast?

My junior year of high school, I enrolled in A.P. Biology (plot twist). I hated science, but I wanted to prove to…someone?…that I could excel at anything, even if it gave me hell. (Thank goodness it eliminated some science credits later down the line in college.)

I primarily remember two things from that class with the sweet and odd professor who called me “Chlo” because he didn’t realize “Chloe” had a hard-e ending.

The first came from that summer reading. I can’t remember the book’s title, but I remember how it described the evolution of our tastebuds to detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami from our sense of survival. If something tasted good, it was because our ancestors had pre-programmed us with the inclination toward salt or sugar or other edible substances. Foods taste good because our bodies recognize that these will not kill us. As I always say, the most delicious meal is the meal you survive.

That A.P. Bio classroom and the terribly uncomfortable experience of sitting on backless stools for an hour only comes back to me now. There were living growths in jellied petri dishes and algae cubs. We weighed little worms ordered by the cupful on a science-teacher-supply website, and we had to measure (a) how much it ate from a leaf, (b) how much it pooped, and (c) how much it grew based on the difference. Biomass was the poop, rebranded to be an essential piece of determining life.

We also learned about yeast, which frothed when introduced to liquified sugar. This small dust, I realize now more than I did in the lab, is alive and hungry with a sweet tooth. Fungi: they’re just like us.

School subjects can loose their interest if you can’t connect the larger picture (we were the biomass all along), and I couldn’t see the story yet. To my biology teacher’s horror and/or delight, I have to rewind in order to understand bread. I have to meet this “yeast” character.