On Kneading

I have always found baking to be a wonderful way to simultaneously explore my interests in science and feeding others. Cooking might be my first passion, with its flexibility and lack of rules. But baking… baking sans recipe takes the willingness to fail openly and miserably as well as a bit of a scientific hypothesis behind each new endeavor. Admittedly, I find it kind of thrilling to muddle around in uncharted baking territory, dough and measuring cups and flour flying everywhere.

I have been baking a lot lately for various reasons and various projects. I’ll tell you more about those projects soon – ugh, not trying to be opaque – but feeding those around us seems reason enough to bake, does it not?

When you are making a bread that requires kneading – the development of gluten and elasticity – there is a funny thing that happens which I find to be especially true of dealing with whole wheat doughs. You knead and knead and the dough is shaggy and couldn’t possibly have a hope of becoming a lovely, cohesive loaf of bread. You begin to think it will never happen, this dough will forever and always be a shaggy lump that will bake into nothing better than a doorstop.

And then it happens, when you least expect it and couldn’t even will it to be with another one of your stretch-and-folds. You’ve all but given up when suddenly the dough tightens a bit. The shaggy-factor starts to diminish. The feel of it in your sticky, floured hands becomes more supple, more cohesive. There is bread at the end of the tunnel and you can smell the tang of the sourdough and the nuttiness of the wheat. You consider calling it a day and moving onto the bulk ferment. Dishes – and a hundred other things – are waiting, afterall.

But you can’t stop right then and there; a few more minutes are required. If you stop now your bread won’t necessarily be destined for doorstopville, but it also won’t be as good as it can be either. So you keep kneading, even after you think everything has changed.

Finally, maybe five minutes later, something shifts once again. One more stretch with the heel of your hand changes nothing, the fold makes no difference. And so you stop. If you’ve done this enough then you know what comes next. You pull off a piece of dough and you stretch it ever so gently and hold it up to your south-facing window until a hint of light shows through.

It doesn’t break, it bends; the light shines through.

The other day, as I kneaded a stiff bagel dough and the children swirled around me in the afternoon sunlight, I was sure there was something to this… something metaphorical and representative of so many things. Maybe it is, maybe I should just keep kneading.

Or, maybe it’s just bread.