Bread is the staff, not gravel, of life

If you have been in prison for 5 years, you will likely be OK with any sort of bread that isn’t some kind of super soft commercial loaf approaching the texture of cotton candy. You know what I mean, I am sure: the kind of bread that somehow manages to revert to dough once it’s past your teeth. The kind of bread that miraculously pastes itself to the inside of your mouth one the second chew. The kind of bread for which the eater’s salvation is that it might get a little stale; that way the eater gets a little bit of texture. So, after 5 years, I’ve had done with that sort of loaf, yet being the anarchist that I am, it’s still too much to ask of myself to coax and nurture dough through all its hand-made artisanal phases. The same attitude that guides my gardening shapes my baking.

Yet I know that baking, even in a bread machine, is all about proportion and exactitude. Even when I make a machine loaf, I try to flow the recipes precisely. It’s somewhat anathema to my soul, but I do it for the bread which is usually a spiritual boost. Last weekend, I was looking through a bread machine cookbook and came across a loaf I thought might be fun and unusual: tomato herb bread. The primary liquid the recipe required was tomato sauce. The concept seemed sound, but I should have taken warning from the note the author appended to the recipe: “UPi can make your own tomato sauce by pureeing fresh tomatoes and then simmering them to remove some of the liquid. The taste and color will not be quite as intense as with purchased sauce.” Maybe those lines represent one of the places where anarchist cooks and law-abiding bakers diverge. Why would I made a tomato sauce with less color and flavor than one from a jar? Why on earth would I wizz up plain tomatoes in a blender and have the nerve to call it “sauce”? Part of my attraction to this bread recipe is that I had a bowl full of garden tomatoes on the kitchen table and I wanted and needed to do something with them. I was going to make some very edible sauce anyway, so why not take part of it and use it for the bread, too?

The tomato sauce came together in a snap, and I didn’t follow a recipe. I simply went out to the garden and found most of the things that I needed. My mechanical cooking cheat for sauce is that I make it in a Vitamix blender. It’s ever so fast and satisfying, and it makes for good texture with no waste. Into the blender I placed:

• Three garden jalapenos with just the stems removed
• A couple small onions from the garden
• A tasteful bunch of fresh, garden-grown basil
• A few sprigs of garden-raised thyme
• About 3 garlic cloves
• Salt
• Pepper
• About a Tablespoon of sugar (I think virtually all homemade tomato sauces require a bit of sugar, just to take the acidic edge off the tomato)
• Around a couple tablespoons to dried oregano from the pantry
• Garden grown tomatoes enough to fill the blender up to just short of the top.

Start the blender on low, and then turn it up to high. Let it run for about 30 seconds while you make sure all the ingredients get tamped down. When it’s a nice smooth consistency (and a VitaMix makes damn sure of that), turn off the blender and pour the sauce into the pan and simmer until you get the texture you want. Taste to see if it’s what you like and adjust the seasoning form there according to your wildest imagination. With pretty much no effort, you get a delicious sauce that is, quite frankly, more colorful and flavorful than any commercial jar will give you.

Having triumphed with the sauce, I turned to the bread. This is where things went south. Then thing about bread machine recipes is that they are pretty much “dump and leave” propositions, much like the sauce itself. Just put the stuff in in the proper order and let the machine take care of the rest. Well, usually. I faithfully follow the instructions and put together the following ingredients in the proper order (“as recommended by the machine’s manufacturer,” as the bread machine cliche goes). I was going to be a a law-abider, not a bread felon.

• 1 cup tomato sauce at 80 to 90 degrees F
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 2 Tbsp dried basil
• 2 Tbsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan
• 3 cups white bread flour
• 2 1/4 tsp bread machine or instant yeast

Again, not too hard, is it? Yet from the moment the machine started mixing the ingredients together I was pretty sure that this was going to be an utter failure. Just looking at what was supposed to be the dough, I could see it was lacking liquid. Trying to be a good baking citizen, I looked at other recipes to see if the liquid/dry proportions were at least in the ballpark. They were, but I could still see that failure coming on. Still, what do I know? I’m not the baking expert. So I let the recipe do it’s thing. Bad idea. The dough mixed up into chunks of tomato gravel and baked into more or less what geologists would call a “conglomerate.” It smelled OK, but really that was the only appetizing thing about it. In the end, we don’t eat with our noses. And I’m left feeling like a total fool for following the rules and being rewarded with an inedible batch of nasty.

Because I can’t just let a bad recipe win, I have to start over again. My way this time. I put in everything in the exact same order once again, but this time I’m waiting to break the rules which, clearly, need to be broken. As I watch the mix start, I can see the gravel is emerging once more, so I know it’s the recipe and not me. This time, however, I’m standing my with an extra cup of watered-down tomato sauce. I figured: a) anybody who things commercial sauce is going to be extra flavorful is likely also the kind of person who things sauce is really watery; b) I pictures one of my pet cooking peeves about pasta and sauce — the people serve pasta swimming in a pools os sauce. No. No. No. The sauce is supposed to be an accent to the pasta, not vice versa, but more on these hobbyhorse of mine in another Kitchen Laundry post; c) most importantly, this dough was going need a substantial amount of additional liquid to become a dough at all. So as the material mixed and the concrete reformed, I hoovered over the proto-bread and added more sauce. And more sauce. And more sauce. After a bit, an actual bread dough formed. That is after I had added between 1/3 and 1/2 cup more sauce to the mix. The recipe was off my at least 33% when it came to getting just a proper consistency.

Of course, trepidation stayed with me. Now that I had violated the letter of the recipe law, would I have made a bad bread that could only be blamed on me? Was I going to have to be held accountable for throwing out another failed loaf? But no, I would not be held accountable for this violation. My loaf actually came out well-formed and delicious. Of course, I get no credit from the recipe authorities for this, either, but self-satisfaction is what it’s all about, isn’t it (asked with biting irony)? I’m willing to offer that perhaps the recipe just had a typo in it, but that’s argued against my the fact that the recipes for smaller loaves of this same bread retain the same gravel-creating proportions. I’m obviously all too tempted to offer this whole episode as a metaphor for life before, during, and after prison. Playing by the rules only gets you so far, especially with the rules are jacked up to begin with. But I’m sure you already drew your own conclusions about where I was going with this. I hate to seem as if I’m in a continual struggle against authority; I don’t think I am. Yet I also know that I often — far too often, it seems — find myself having to figure out ways to succeed because the professionals are not up to their jobs. No matter, though; the bread as good as far from prison pap.