Happy 4/20: Cyber Doom, Gluten-Free Bread, and Engaging With a More Positive Reality
Caption updated 3/12/22
I missed the 2020 trend of loving thine neighbors by stocking up on all the flour and butter in excess because cottage core was a thing for the more romantic, but everyone just wanted to make bread in general, away from the germ infested reaches of everyone’s worst Corona Virus fueled nightmares. I watched the bread bakers longingly from a virtual window, anonymous behind a computer screen, gluten intolerant and mildly afraid of living yeast, enamored of the variations of bread produced from the warm ovens of strangers.
It’s 2021 now, and I keep hearing about Zoom fatigue as well as everyone’s glossy post-Corona leisure plans. I still peer out of my Internet window but a little less, relating completely with not only Zoom fatigue, even if I enjoy my Zoom meetings, but cyber doom in general. In 2020 and 2021, the outer world became a dangerous place filled with microbe terrors, and the misleading little black soul traps of our most fantastic technology became the mediums of our connection to other humans. The utility is clear, but daily routines of “human connection” purveyed by big tech giants with control trips started wearing on me. The time finally came for me to creep away from my cyber cell view and engage with living reality. It was 2021, and it was time to bake bread.
Years ago, there was a band from Germany named Denmantau that hung out at the local party house. Every Sunday, they’d get stoned and bake loaves of bread for the week. I remember admiring their gumption because it seemed like a lot of work to bake bread, especially when hungover, but when I asked about it, they all said it really wasn’t that much work at all. They grew up in families that baked bread every single week for years. The band members were used to baking fresh bread every week at home in Germany, even after they moved out of their parents’ homes, and they just couldn’t feel comfortable without the ritual. More than any Tik Tok Instagram cottage core bread imagery fest, it was their happy bread baking ways combined with smart phone angst that inspired me to start baking bread too (even if it ended up happening a decade later).
This memory of their very real and earthy engagement with reality popped up during one of my more recent down the Internet rabbit hole missions of exploring tech security and the ever reaching, all seeing eye of Big Brother. I felt like I needed to connect with reality, here inside my home, the setting for my Internet fueled time sucks, more than anywhere else. After all, even in non-epidemic times, the home is where most of us reside, living out our passing days. I can anticipate some of you arguing that the home is full of reality anyway, in all its myriad non-romanticized forms. You might cite howling children, leaking roofs, or mold growing in last week’s soup and argue that the cyber security void of your phone is a pleasing escape. If so, I would suggest that bread baking is a pleasant escape too, except one that involves the very real combination of separate elements into making something new and almost universally pleasing. I would also counter that reading more about how flimsy most Internet security really is and how exposed to strange eyes all your personal information potentially is once it is up on the web is perhaps enough to spoil the novelty of the dopamine juicing light of your daily web routines. I’m not saying I am somehow less susceptibility to Internet leisure or information delves; rather, I am suggesting that baking bread is a nice way to get real. You can eat it while you think about hackers and how that girl you met once named Marci painted her room orange and posted about it on your Internet feed of choice. Whatever you like. Choose your own adventure.
Back to bread: My cyber angst and my disdain of bad gluten free bread, because there is quite a lot of that, mixed with my positive associations of domesticity all contributed to my dream of baking my own bread coming true. I’ve been missing good bread. Before I had allergy testing and discovered that source of some of my health woes tied into wheat gluten, I loved sourdough, eating it enthusiastically on a weekly basis. However, in my post-allergy test reality, gluten-free bread is what’s on the menu, and at the grocery stores it costs $5 to $7 — all while being displeasing in flavor and texture, even the sourdough. There are some bakeries with a reputation for excellent gluten-free bread that will ship loaves out, but spending $15 on a loaf of bread seems extravagant. When I ate regular bread, I usually would buy the bread from the bakery and slice it myself, so eating bad gluten-free bread is a sad task. I’ve tried out some gluten free bakeries that were okay, definitely not anything extraordinary, but there aren’t any near me. Some of you may have had similar experiences although I know for a fact some of you are regular bread aficionados and are (not so) secretly laughing at my bread travails.
For the gluten-free crowd (the rest of ya’ll go eat your delicious regular gluten bread), I recommend a cookbook called Cannelle et Vanille by Aran Goyoaga, a cook and baker with Basque roots. Her gluten-free recipes have a reputation of being top notch, so I figured I’d give it a try. The cookbook has several gluten free bread recipes, including sourdough, which includes a starter that needs to be fed for about five days before the baking process. I decided on the Black Olive, Caraway, and Honey Yeast Bread since I didn’t want to wait for the culture to develop (insert nerdy and sort of clever “the problem with the modern world” joke here).
I anticipate questions about the types of ingredients you’ll need to get down with your own gluten-free bread baking project. If you don’t already have a collection of gluten-free flours, you will need to get some. This recipe uses brown rice flour, sorghum flour, tapioca starch, and psyllium husk powder. I put off gluten-free baking because of all the flours needed, but I now see it as an investment that will save money in the end since store bought gluten-free bread tends to be pricey.
The Black Olive, Caraway, and Honey Yeast Bread was absolutely amazing. It wasn’t too hard to make. The ritualistic components of the bread baking task will connect you right to the heart beat of life in a totally non-threatening, positive way — no “cyber secured” credit card information needed. Mixing up the yeast and water at the right temperature and waiting for it to do its thing is interesting. It feels like brewing some sort of potion, and in a way it is. It is the elixir that gives life to what otherwise would be a very flat concoction. I do recommend having a thermometer on hand; that way you won’t overheat your yeast, which is alive and needs to stay that way to expand. Once I mixed the ingredients together and kneaded, the dough had to rest for about an hour, teaching us the value of naps: it makes for good bread and happy people. Then, following the clearly written instructions, I baked my loaf for an hour and 45 minutes.
Immediately after taking the loaf out of the oven, the scent of the orange blossom honey I had used emanated into the air. I was surprised at how strong the scent was, but I took it as a good sign. Truth be told, I was worried the honey would be too aromatic, but the only other honey in the cupboard was lavender honey, which would have been too floral. Everything turned out fine. I didn’t feel like my privacy was being impinged upon by big tech, and I knew I was going to have some delicious bread to eat.
After the bread had cooled, it was time to cut. The freshly cut bread still smelled like honey, but it didn’t taste like honey. It tasted almost like a sourdough actually. It was salty rather than sweet. The best part was the crust was like real bread. It had a thin, crisp, golden brown crust and the inside was soft but not spongy with a light crumb to it.
Because it is so easy to make and so delicious, it is certain to be a household staple, albeit for full disclosure, a top motivation is getting me away from the Internet. If you are allergic to Internet drama and gluten, you need to get this cookbook — seriously. Do you really want to keep eating bad bread? Once you get started baking your own bread, you may find that the process is oddly soothing. You can balance out your sociopolitical rage and undisclosed social media envy with the baking process. Add a glass of wine for best results. Just so you know, there are other recipes in the cookbook that will serve you well, such as the pie crust and the puff pastry. I heard the pizza crust is good too, and it might be just the thing to get some people to visit you in real life — once you feel vaccinated and safe, of course.
