Making Bread

One of the highlights of last year was the end of my stomach problems. But it came along with a disappointment: being diagnosed with a gluten intolerance. In other words, 2019 was the end of bread.

Gluten-free bread can either be bad or dreadful. In the last months, breakfast was no longer my favourite meal of the day, and lunches out for a sandwich or a soup (always with bread) stopped being the relaxing break after a busy morning. You can switch off when the food is minimally decent, but you cannot when the bread is bad.

Coming close to accepting it, at Christmas I received Cannelle et Vanille, a gluten-free cookbook by the Basque chef Aran Goyoaga. Her moist and crusty sourdough bread is nothing like to what’s out there in the shops. Also, laborious. If I want to go back to bread, I need to slow down.

Along with the joy of eating bread again, I also discovered the joy of making it. The new popularity of producing physical things with our hands (pottery, clothes, jewellery…) is directly linked to retrieving ourselves from the screen. In the last week, I’ve spent a significant amount of time preparing the starter and attending its needs, as well as making the dough. My attention has become more and more focused. Is the starter bubbling? Is there any lump in the dough? What’s the temperature of this room?

Making bread is close to meditation. If I want to do it properly, I need to reject the outside world. I can’t be anywhere else (not even with my imagination) but in the kitchen, where everything gets messy. My hands, my shirt, the sleeves, which gradually rolled down. My fingers, with white dust in the nails, take new directions, completely different to typing. They were so sticky that I can’t even touch my phone. 

Buy Cannelle et Vanille or visit Aran Goyoaga’s page.