Real Food Has Curves

When Bruce and I met, I was the baker in the family. It stemmed from an awful failure in graduate school: orange breakfast rolls. I was taking an advanced seminar in medieval chivalric romance, it met at 8:00 am, and we grad students agreed to take turns bringing in breakfast to help us get through three hours of Petrarchan references. Also? The professor was a strict, emaciated, no-nonsense type who'd spent her entire adult life crawling around convents in Europe to find a source for one half of Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale. In other words, she wasn't exactly a laugh a minute.

On the week I was up for breakfast, I decided to make this orange breakfast roll recipe I'd found in some cooking magazine--sort of like cinnamon rolls but with candied orange peel and a pinch of ground cardamom sprinkled on the dough before it was rolled up.

I was up until four in the morning trying to get the stuff to rise.

Out of that misfortune came a determination to make yeast work. (Maybe I'd taken in some of that grim single-mindedness from my convent-crawling professor.)

Over the ensuing years, I baked a lot of bread. Before I met Bruce and even after. Because he was at first the typical chef-school type: I cook; I don't bake. (Make sure you say it with a slight sneer.) Except he watched me a few times--and got totally into it. His downfall from the heights of proper cheffery? Making a decent pie crust. But that's another story entirely.

Today he's quite the baker. He whips up fresh bread for dinner--just because.

So on to these simple, homey baguettes we had with soup the other night. I realize I've delayed too long with this story. But consider it proper training for bread-making: lots of patience.

First off, warm a large bowl by running some warm tap water into it. Swirl it around, pour it out, then add 1 pour in warm water (between 105F and 115F). Sprinkle one 1/4-ounce package active dry yeast (that is, about 2 1/2 teaspoons) and 2 teaspoons sugar over the water. Stir a couple times to make sure the yeast dissolves and set aside.

As you may know, the water has to be at exactly the right temperature. Experienced bakers can tell by feel. At this point, if I had to go back to baking bread, I'd have to get out the instant-read meat thermometer, stick it in the stream of water from the tap, and adjust the heat until it was right. Sigh. So much for the writing life. But it has given me other things. Like large, powerful muscles that allow me to sit for extended periods of time.

OK, anyway, after the bowl has set aside for 3 or 4 minutes, the mixture should be foamy, indicating that the yeast has activated and is chowing down on the sugars, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide. (As you know, when humans metabolize sugar, we also produce carbon dioxide. Except we exhale it. Or. . . .)

If the mixture is not foamy, either the water was at the wrong temperature or the yeast had gone "stale" from prolonged or improper storage. Throw the whole thing out and start again. Better safe now than sorry later. You could end up like me, up at four in the morning, waiting for the dough to rise, thinking obsessively about medieval romances. (Oh, well, maybe not that last part.)

Now stir in 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar.

Vinegar? Indeed. It will do three things: the acid will help relax the flour's glutens, resulting in more tender bread; it will later aid in the crust's getting nice and crunchy in the oven; and its addition will provide (along with that tiny amount of ethanol from the yeast) the characteristic, vaguely sour "back taste" that complements the sweet flour so well.

Bruce does the kneading with the KitchenAid stand mixer and its dough hook. He attaches said hook and begins beating the mixture at medium speed to combine the ingredients. Then he adds flour in 2-tablespoon increments until a soft, pliable dough forms, a dough that is nonetheless firm enough that it will not climb up the spinning hook. (In the end, he'll add between 1/2 and 3/4 cup more flour as the dough beats.) He continues beating/kneading for about 8 minutes to refine the flour's glutens.

If you want to do it old-school (that is, by hand), increase the flour you add to the yeast mixture by 1/2 cup. Stir with a wooden spoon until a wet, loose dough forms. Flour a clean, dry work surface, then tump the dough onto it. (Tump. You can take the boy out of Texas but not the Texas out of the boy.) Lightly flour your hands and begin kneading the bread, pressing the heels of your hands into the dough and twisting them in opposite directions, then gathering the dough together, and repeating. And repeating. And repeating. For about 10 minutes, adding little bits of extra flour if the dough becomes sticky or even just tacky. (No, not if the dough develops a taste for red lamp shades and fringe--if instead it sticks to your fingers.)

Once the dough is right, it should be soft, quite smooth, and even "silky" to the touch.

Now lightly butter or grease a large bowl (Bruce uses the same bowl, dumping the dough out and giving the bowl's insides a light spritz with nonstick spray), then put the dough into it, turn the dough over so that its exposed surface is now coated a little with the grease, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and set in a warm, draft-free place to rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Warm, draft-free place. Don't you love food-writing clichés like that? Where the heck do you find one? Around here, it's down in the basement in the furnace room. Or you could put it in a back pantry or other room if the sun is coming in and warming the place nicely. Or in a corner of the kitchen if you've already had the oven on and the room is a tad warm. Or the laundry room if you're running the dryer.

To see how things turned out, click here.