WEEK
1
Bake Like an Egyptian

Acorns were good until bread was found.
—Sir Francis Bacon

Weight: 196 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight:* 2 pounds

I needed a recipe.

Right now. I had somehow arrived at the advent of fifty-two weeks of baking, poised at the very threshold of my project, without having yet decided on a recipe for the first loaf. This oversight was no trifling matter. The inaugural loaf was important: It would be the benchmark against which all the other loaves would be measured, the starting point upon which fifty-one subsequent loaves would be built. This was my foundation, my touchstone, the zeroing of my scale, the calibration of my gas meter, the—

You get the point.

“I need a recipe,” I said. Aloud. To myself. The nice thing about baking alone in the kitchen before dawn is that you can talk to yourself like a crazy person and no one suspects you’re a crazy person. I considered my options. There really aren’t that many differences in bread formulas; the variations are mainly in technique. The basic recipe for bread has been around now for about—well, let’s see, this is the seventeenth . . . minus . . . hmm . . . borrow a one . . . that leaves—six thousand years, which means the copyright has expired and I can repeat it here:

Mix flour, water, salt, and yeast. Let rise, then form a loaf and bake.

This recipe (or something close to it) was found scratched on the inside of a pyramid. It turns out that Egypt, in addition to its more widely known contributions to civilization—the Sphinx, hieroglyphics, Omar Sharif—also gave us bread. Plus something to wash it down with (more about that in a moment). Yet the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to eat wheat. Early forms of wheat, including emmer and einkorn, had been domesticated in the Fertile Crescent since Neolithic times. Most commonly, these grains were cooked with water and eaten as gruel. Eventually it occurred to someone to press the gruel into a disk shape and grill it on a hot stone, and flatbread was born (if the inventor had realized that said innovation would culminate in the McDonald’s Snack Wrap, he might have buried it with Tutankhamen).

That might have been the end of it, were it not for another culinary invention of the Egyptians. They liked to tip a cold one back now and then (or, more likely, a warm one) and had numerous small breweries where they cultivated brewer’s yeast. Now, maybe it happened this way and maybe it didn’t, but it seems quite likely that one day a tipsy cook spilled a little beer into the dough, and the inevitable happened: yeast and dough were accidentally mixed, and leavened bread was born.*

It didn’t take long for bread—an obvious improvement over gruel—to become a staple of the Middle Eastern diet. Bread makes a pretty complete food. The wheat kernel, or seed, provides protein, starch, fat, and fiber and is rich in a number of important vitamins. Bread became such a major part of life in Egypt, with laborers paid in loaves, that this food would come to be known, in Egyptian Arabic, as aish, literally “life.”

I rather fancied the notion that I was trying to perfect life and that my method for doing so wasn’t appreciably different from that of Pharaoh’s baker. My life would have no more than four simple ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt. I would make my life free-form, without a pan, directly on a stone in the oven.

Of course, to make a loaf, I needed a little more to go on than a hieroglyphic scrawl. The day after my bread epiphany in that upper-crust restaurant, I’d called my younger brother, Rob, and told him I wanted to learn to bake bread. He was a pretty fair baker himself, and my request might have triggered some sibling rivalry—if it were me, I’d have been tempted to borrow a page from our grandmother’s book and leave out one crucial ingredient (like salt)—but Rob welcomed me into the fraternity of home bakers, giving me his complete recipe (as far as I know), his encouragement, and, shortly after, my first artisan bread cookbook.

I had been tinkering on and off with Rob’s recipe, keeping track of the variations and results in a log, but it looked to be an evolutionary dead end: the bread had changed, but it was never as good as Rob’s, let alone the sublime object of my desire. I’ve mentioned the rock-hard crust, but the crumb—the term bakers use to describe the texture of the bread’s interior, not the little bits that fall to the table—was just as bad. No matter how much or how little yeast I added, how long or how short the rising time, or how long I left the bread in the oven, the loaves invariably had a dense, undercooked crumb most notable for its complete lack of gas pockets. Frustrated, I’d stopped baking bread altogether over a year earlier.

“All right,” I finally announced on this morning of renaissance. “The last shall be first.” Meaning I’d begin this touchstone loaf by using the same recipe I’d used for the last loaf I’d baked. Following this latest variation of Rob’s recipe, I began by mixing the flours, mostly all-purpose white flour, with a little whole wheat and rye for flavor. I took about a third of this flour mixture and added it to all the water, along with a mere teaspoon of active dry yeast, making a batter called a sponge or poolish (the word most likely refers to the Polish bakers who introduced this method to France in the nineteenth century). I then let the poolish—with the consistency of thin pancake batter—sit. After four or five hours, it would be aromatic and bubbly, full of complex compounds that would contribute flavor and aroma to the finished bread. Only then would I mix in the rest of the flour and salt and knead the dough.

Use of a preferment, as the poolish and other methods (such as a biga or a pâte fermentée) are called, is a technique you won’t find in your mother’s copy of Fannie Farmer or likely even at your local bakery, where a “straight dough”—in which everything is mixed at once, kneaded, and set aside to rise—is generally the rule. A straight dough is a much faster way to make bread and lends itself well to automation.

The Egyptians didn’t have to worry about preferments, as their bread was leavened by saving a little of today’s dough to use in tomorrow’s bread—the original preferment. Most modern bakers start from scratch with fresh commercial yeast for each new batch, but this just doesn’t provide the kind of flavor that old yeast brings to the table. The poolish, even though it is started with fresh yeast, is one way to recapture some of that lost flavor, to bake more like an Egyptian.

Thanks to the custom of decorating their tombs with paintings of everyday life and their penchant for record keeping, we actually know more about how Egyptians baked four thousand years ago than we do about baking in, say, medieval England. We know, for example, that during the thirty-year reign of Ramses III, his royal bakery distributed 7 million loaves of bread to the temples. We know how the bread was made; a detailed tomb painting of the bakery illustrates every phase of the process, including a detail of a large trough of dough being kneaded by foot. We know that Egyptian bakers had a repertoire of over fifteen varieties of bread. They had round breads, braided breads, even breads shaped like pyramids; breads with poppy seeds and sesame seeds; and bread with camphor.

And yet here I was, thousands of years later, restricting myself for the next year to a single type of loaf, with just four ingredients. I was baking like an Egyptian, but less so. There’s nothing like progress.