Slow Riser

I read in today’s newspaper about Sarah Palin’s first book which is coming out “much sooner than expected,” and has already scored as Amazon’s best-selling book before its release date in six weeks. Her 400-page book was originally slated for release in Spring 2010, but SuperWoman was able to finish it in just four months after the book deal was announced. Her publisher assures us that Palin has been “hands on” at every phase.

I sit at my kitchen table, in my atelier, and let out a big hrumph . . . like a bowl of maximally risen bread dough imploding with a swift punch to the belly. 

Many years ago I learned of a woman willing to share her recipe for a whole wheat bread that went from grain bin to table in less than two hours. “You can prepare the rest of your dinner while the bread is baking,” she assured me. I never met this woman in person, but I spoke to her many times on the phone regarding troubleshooting the technique. She had a mucous-y voice -- as though something were gurgling deep inside her lungs.

Very simply, her technique is to grind the wheat berries into flour; to add three times as much yeast as a normal recipe would call for; to decrease the salt somewhat (because salt slows yeast); to eliminate the first rise in the bowl and rather put the shaped loaves directly into bread pans where they will have their one and only 20-minute rise in a cold oven before you turn it on with the pans still inside and let the preheating act as a booster to the yeast cells that have yet to figure out what’s happening. The bread seems to explode with height in the oven – a fun spectacle to watch if you keep the oven light on. Thirty or 40 minutes later you have bread on the cutting board in the middle of the kitchen table.

I made the bread many times, always pleased with the rise, but somewhat suspicious of the doughy, moist and dark crumbs left on the cutting board – and the sensation of heaviness in the belly. It was no good at all the next day. Now, 20 years later, I think of her technique as similar to giving great amounts of fertilizer to plants, or to feeding corn and hormones to a young cow bound for slaughter in the year it was born.

Then I discovered the three-day bread – a technique using the natural yeasts of grape skins and kitchen air. A dough kneaded on Tuesday will gladly repay you on Thursday, I like to say. First you give the ingredients a slow kneading with plenty of 20-minute resting periods; then a 4- to 6-hour rest in a large, beautiful and old bread bowl; then a gentle deflation, removal from the bowl, and another hour-long rest while laying naked on the countertop (the dough); then you separate and form the dough into round loaves and let them rest some more, this time covered with linen towels from a beach gift shop you once visited; then you place the swelling loaves into bread baskets and let those rest for maybe 2 hours in that position; then you place the bread baskets in the refrigerator and let them rest 24 hours or so; it's Thursday now and you set the well-rested, dough-in-baskets onto the kitchen counter and let them rest and warm up for a few or several hours. You've got to preheat the oven for at least an hour to thoroughly heat that inch-thick baking stone -- now remove the loaves from their cozy baskets, let them rest naked again; carefully slit a smiley face across each top, rest again; then thank each one before sliding them onto the baking stone in the oven where they will gladly rise for you. Forty minutes later you will gingerly place each one on a cooling rack where they will rest for about 2 hours, all the while whistling and whispering and cackling to all those passersby who care to listen . . .

I know I’m a slow writer. It might take me four months of observing my birds at the feeder to come up with a metaphor for . . . something. It’s taken me 20 years to recall the dangerous technique of a fast riser I’ve never met.