At lunch in town this week my friend Kim and I talked about bread baking, something we both love to do. Here in the central mountains of Mexico, when winter arrives, it’s more tempting than ever to turn the oven on and banish the chill in the air by baking.

For the past few years I’ve been avoiding bread baking due to digestive issues, which I blamed, in part, on gluten. Lately, though, I’ve been tiptoeing back to bread, with some success, I’m relieved to report. Gluten, it appears, is not the culprit. So I’m happily baking again.

I showed Kim this photo of the bread I baked on Sunday, and that got me started. I used to teach bread baking professionally – in New York, and later in New Mexico — so it’s easy for me to slip into professorial mode. 

I told Kim about the “golden ratio” (similar to but not the same as the “Golden Mean”), which refers to widely accepted bakers’ percentages for yeast bread’s most basic ingredients. These ratios are handy guidelines for achieving optimal results.

As my colleague Professor Google explains it (better than I): “Baking’s Golden Ratio refers to a standard ratio of ingredients by weight in a basic bread recipe: 5 parts flour to 3 parts water (a 5:3 ratio, or 100% flour to 60% water in baker’s percentage terms), plus typically 2% salt and 1% instant yeast relative to the flour weight. … Understanding these ratios helps bakers adjust recipes and control variables like hydration and fermentation,” Prof. Google says. 

The percentages below are based on the weight of the flour, which is always 100%:

Flour	100% (e.g., 500g)
Water (Hydration)	60% (e.g., 300g)
Salt	2% (e.g., 10g)
Instant Yeast	1% (e.g., 5g)

So much for the science of it. For Kim and me, in our respective casas, bread-baking is just plain fun. And I’ve been known to wax poetic about the process, using words such as “mystical,” “miraculous,” “fundamental,” “universal,” and symbolic of life itself.

On Sunday, after baking these golden buns, I felt inspired to write a poem-like thing:

            Bread and…

            Before Rome fell

            the people trembled

            and grumbled.

            So their rulers,

            to appease and distract,

            gave them bread

            for their bellies

            and circuses

            for belly laughs.

            I’ve just baked bread

            and watched a comedy show.

            I’m tired of trembling.

            And what good does grumbling do

            when all appears to be falling?

            Instead, eat home-baked bread

            and slather it with jam.

It’s not as if I’ve given up on following the harrowing news of the world; this, I feel strongly, is the responsibility of every thinking, feeling, caring citizen. Rather, it’s an effort to achieve a better balance in my life. Bread baking makes me happy – the feel of the dough in my hands as I knead it, the sight of the risen (living!) dough before baking, the intoxicating fragrance of the just-baked bread that lingers in the air for hours afterward. And, while waiting for the bread to finish baking, watching old SNL clips on YouTube that make me laugh out loud… 

These are lessons for me. We must go on. We must eat. We must laugh. 

Again I’m reminded  of a sonnet by one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, that ends with, “If I would help the weak, I must be fed/ In wit and purpose, pour away despair/ And rinse the cup, eat happiness like bread.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

• I’ve written other WOWs about bread baking. Here’s a recent one: https://blog.bonnieleeblack.com/bread/ .
• I didn’t follow a specific recipe for the golden buns in the photo above. (I’ve been baking bread for so many years, I know the Golden Ratio by heart.)  But these are loosely based on James Beard’s classic recipe for Yeast-Raised Cornmeal Bread in his book, BEARD ON BREAD. Here’s the link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Recipe+for+James+Beard%27s+Yeast-Raised+Cornmeal+Bread/ .