Victuals & Drink, Volume 6 number 6, June 2004 The Staff of Life “This is real bread,” said my German husband. He should know. Germany has at least 200 kinds of bread, all of them delicious, fragrant, and full of excellent ingredients that are good and healthy for you. Otherwise, it isn’t considered to be bread. If the French brought their cheeses and the Germans their bread to the same table, there would be no time for arguments. Everybody would be too busy eating. (Of course, the French are no slouches at breadmaking, either, but for a filling manna, you can’t beat old Deutschland.) The Americans, on the other hand, have Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is useful in plumbing. If you need to absorb water in a pipe in order to make a good solder join, you can stuff it in the pipe and the Wonder Bread will soak up the water. Then the plumber can repair the join without water droplets getting in the way. The bread is still stuck in the pipe, but when the repairs are done, you just turn on the water and it will dissolve and be carried away. It also makes good spitballs. And I loved it for butter and sugar sandwiches when I was a child—no flavor, but it held the sandwich filling together. But as bread, Wonder Bread is as far from the staff of life as is library paste. Edible, but... Most of the bread I was raised on was a step up from Wonder Bread. It was brown, but almost as soft and squidgy. Sometimes it was white, but came with raisins. This promptly got toasted and covered with quantities of butter, cinnamon, and sugar. (Can’t taste the lack of bread flavor that way.) The exception was Boston black bread, which we bought in a can. The loaf was cylindrical and sweet and had no crust. We sliced it up and smeared it with butter or cream cheese. Heaven. Still, it isn’t exactly real bread when it comes out of a can. Sometimes I can find bread at the store which imitates real bread, with a crust (sort of) and a few seeds stuck on, and maybe a sunflower seed or two in the loaf itself. The bread to which my husband was referring was none of these wimpy breadlike shadows: it was the real thing. I’ve never had sesame bread like this: an explosion of sesame flavor that made me shout out loud, “WOW!” It was a novel experience, being so surprised and pleased by the flavor of bread that it made me yell! It had a chewy crust firm enough to actually chew but not so tough that my jaw got tired or my teeth got chipped. It was just right. Everything about it was just right. We weren’t in Germany, though: this bread was a sample from the Hearthside Bakery, right here in the Tanana Valley. Who woulda thunk it? The bread vanished down our gullets. The next loaf we got from Hearthside was a multigrain “sun loaf,” with such a strong flavor of sourdough it made me laugh in delight. Then came an almond raisin loaf. The almonds were whole, but again, soft enough to chew. The bread was slightly sweet and again, so good it made me exclaim out loud, again. It, too, went away far too quickly. Now we’re eating “supreme wheat bread”—and it is. Hearthside, which has been covered in Dermot Cole’s column, is selling bread at the Farmer’s Market and operating as a community shared bakery, similar to Calypso Farm’s community shared agriculture subscriptions. Hans and I bought a subscription, good for a loaf a week for two months. The bakery brings subscription loaves to a community drop-off/pick-up point (in Ester, the John Trigg Ester Library) and subscribers come pick up their loaves. It’s wonderful. These breads are made with sourdough starter, organic whole wheat flour, and other organic ingredients. Deb Moore, one of the two owners of the bakery (the other is Todd Burnside) tells me that they simply can’t make enough of the rye bread, which Hans and I have yet totaste. I can’t wait. Hearthside has a website at www.hearthsidebakery.com.
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