Like 5,000,000 others, we tried the ubiquitous no-knead bread late last year. And you know what? It's fine. It lives up to its every promise -- bulletproof crust, airy crumb, zero effort. But like David Lebovitz, I found it to be a tad dead on the palate, and the crumb to be rather leathery and not at all absorbent, which made it a less than stellar companion to the soup we ate it with. But if it inspires people to start baking bread in their own homes, I endorse it wholly. Consider it a gateway bread.
DPaul is the bread baker in this household. Over the years he has turned out countless pizza doughs, focaccie and rustic loaves, and has acquired an artful hand. He knows how to make the dough rise and spring to his touch. He is the yeast whisperer.
Since the utter disappearance of our beloved Brother Juniper bread, we have been hopping from loaf to loaf of store-bought sandwich bread, with little to no satisfaction. Whole wheat loaves are alternately too dry or too gummy, and white loaves are bland and uninteresting. It was time to take matters into our own hands and make sandwich bread.
Living in San Francisco, where we have not one but many of the best artisanal bakeries in the country, the very notion of "white bread" is practically anathema. It smacks of the pedestrian, the mainstream, suburbia. It is the antithesis of artisanship. Or is it?
I mean, there has to be a reason why white bread became the iconic loaf of American sandwiches. Somewhere in its obscured history, it must once have been a flavorful bread that happened to serve well as a vessel for fillings. It had to have a consistent, dense crumb, a soft crust and enough flavor to make you actually want to eat it.
How long ago? According to our 1968 edition of Time-Life Foods of the World: American Cooking,
As early as 1869 two sisters, Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe (the latter known for her Uncle Tom's Cabin), in their book, The American Woman's Home, lamented the increasing popularity of store-bought bread and blamed its rise on those people who saw lightness as the only criterion of good bread.
It goes on to explain how manufactured bread, no matter how bad, became fashionable as a symbol of affluence, and that by World War II, homemade bread became a casualty of the newly busy working woman.
And so what are we left with? A society that eats white bread out of a deeply entrenched habit, yet eats an inferior product because for generations they have never known anything different. How many of us were weaned on Wonder Bread? We might as well have eaten Pla-Doh. But buck up, there's hope.
This same book, of the long-defunct Time-Life series (keep your eyes on eBay for these, folks; they're an invaluable part of any cookbook collection!) offers up an American White Bread recipe that is simply to die for. The crumb is even, moist and soft, yet has enough structure to keep its shape. The crust is golden and soft. And the whole creature is fragrant and rather intensely flavorful. And toasted? Well.
Sure, it takes more effort than the no-knead bread, but anything worth doing is worth doing well. Sometimes, you need to knead.
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