The first time I made bread, it resembled a burnt frisbee more than something meant for lunch. My dog, Charlie was excited because he thought I'd baked him a new toy.
Do you see that face? I don't like disappointing that face.
Despite how the bread looked, we—my wife, not my dog though he was certainly game—still gnawed on a few slices. We even tried covering it in butter and strawberry jam but nothing redeemed it from being a pancake brick. This was not my first failure. Bread—and all other dough-related endeavors—had eluded me for years. I always added way too much flour, cursed the mess it made on my countertops, and threw my hands up when I couldn't produce something that looked like the pictures online.
I like to cook. I even think I'm pretty good at it. Give me a recipe, and I will dig into it and cook the damn thing until I get it near perfect. I will put hours of research into the best equipment, different techniques, ingredients, this brand vs that brand until I've discovered my favorite way to sear a ribeye. I like to obsess, and I understand this can be unhealthy.
I'm not sure what it was about that particular loaf of bread that spurred me into this bread-baking kick, but I decided enough was enough. I was going to learn how to bake bread until I made the perfect loaf.
But bread doesn't work that way. Bread recipes sort of look and sometimes even sound like chemistry. Like if you balance the equation the right way, it'll look like the pictures online. There are baking and hydration percentages. You can measure your ingredients with a scale. Recipes tell you how many hours it takes to ferment, proof, rise. Once you get it right, once you find the perfect recipe and gather all the best tools and ingredients and have the technique down, that should be it. Right?
Except that you're working with a living thing. Whether you're using commercially packaged yeast or a bubbling sourdough starter, mathematical baking has another side to the equation: art. Experienced bakers know the right look and feel. They understand the million different nuances to their dough and the myriad ways it can all go wrong. Sure, over time and with plenty of practice and skill, bakers minimize mistakes and produce reliable loaves of delicious bread. Loaf to loaf, however, there is a wild range of inconsistencies and differences. From your oven spring to how your crust behaves, you never know what's going to happen. So much is going on beneath the surface on a microscopic level that it's impossible to really get a handle on anything. What the hell is gluten anyways? A good baker knows how to dance to chaos.
That's why I love baking. I need failure. The failure of that first loaf and all the tiny failures that followed is what makes baking feel so good. It's the Sisyphean toil that makes me feel alive and purposeful. With baking, I have had to set aside my need for perfection and pursue failure. Turns out, even when you get things mostly right and sometimes when you get it pretty wrong, people really love the taste of freshly baked bread. They love it when you bring it over, still warm. Still crackling while it cools.
A friend of mine told me that expectations are premeditated resentments and fuck if that didn't nail me to a wall. I am the king of premeditated resentment and holding onto it and never letting go. And you can't possibly scale the wall to clear my expectations because no matter what, I'm always raising them.
My anxiety and depression lives in my brain. Without a leash, they freewheel over my thoughts and wreak havoc on my emotions. Failure counters that. Even better, practicing failure keeps my expectations healthy. It somehow does for me what I can't accomplish for myself with logic.
I've baked a lot of loaves. Some of them not so good and some of them pretty good. But even when I fail, I often get a pretty tasty loaf of bread that looks like it could be one of those pictures you would find online.
