Skip to main content

Baking Bread

I find myself watching breadmaking recipes without any sound in times of stress. During the pandemic everyone was  baking bread at home mostly for stress relief. I went through my own bread-making phase a bit before the pandemic and did not find it as therapeutic as advertised. The process itself was fun - getting a feel for the dough and gaining confidence in being able to predict the outcome were the highlights. 

But with that came some downsides. For me atleast it turned out my attention to detail was lacking in proportion to what was going through my head at the time. If there was too much noise there, I would start to take short-cuts which resulted in an underwhelming bread. Knowing that in an hour, I would be pulling out of the oven a thing that would bear testament to my mental state was not ideal. Eating that bread over the next several days was a reminder of how it came to taste the way it did. 

So while there was some near term joy from the process of baking bread, it was far from given that it would be a gift that kept giving good things. I was working through my iterations, keeping good notes of what worked and what did not when I ran into S who is the queen of baking bread at home. I had the chance to observe her making baguette from start to finish. The final product was excellent but it also gave me impetus to take pause from my baking activities. 

I had seen first hand what it takes to produce something of that quality which brought home the realization that I was very far and away from any hope of perfection. I lost the taste for store bought bread from the first time I was able to produce something respectable and I never got back to liking it since. Reading this article about a specialist baker's tool reminded me of my own thwarted journey.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more