Almost exactly eight months ago, in a post that dealt with our preparations for our first shabbat in Penamacor, I wrote about baking challah, and added: ‘From challah, I have gradually moved (with subtle but effective nudging from various members of the family) to baking all of our bread. The full story of what that means will have to wait for another post’. To those of you who have been scanning each week’s post since then in eager anticipation, I apologise for keeping you waiting so long. Today, your patience is finally rewarded.

Some time after I took over from Bernice in baking challah every week, my children bought me (which in our family means Esther decided to buy me, told Micha’el, and he agreed that it was an excellent idea) a book of bread recipes from around the world. This was a dual-purpose birthday present. Although it was first published in English, they thought it would be more amusing to buy it in Hebrew, thereby ensuring that before I could confront the challenge of understanding the concepts and techniques of breadmaking, I had to wrestle with the mere language on the page. Of course, ultimately, this greatly enhanced the satisfaction of producing an edible loaf of bread, but there was a fair bit of ground to travel before reaching that ‘ultimately’.

The journey, nevertheless, was well worth it. Since we all started locking down, I know that many more people have discovered for themselves the pleasures of baking bread, so I imagine more than a few of you will already have experienced much of what I have to say about the mystical experience of breadmaking.

In many cultures, bread is regarded as the staple food. In Judaism, the inclusion of bread turns eating into a meal. The blessing we recite before eating bread is very puzzling: Blessed are you O Lord, our God, the King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the land. At first sight, this seems to make no sense. In what way is it possible to regard God as the one who produces bread from the ground? Bread doesn’t come out of the ground; it is, rather, a very refined and processed food. Even worse, it is not God who performs all of that refining and processing, but Man. It is as if Dr Franz Schoenfeld were to claim the credit for Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Dr Schoenfeld, having been awarded his Ph D in Heidelberg in 1849, went on to focus on science. Eventually, he joined his father’s art supplies shop, and began applying his knowledge to the production of oil paints. In the 1870s and 1880s, van Gogh obtained some of his colours from Dr Schoenfeld’s paint factory. This did not make Schoenfeld the creator of Starry Night.

So what is going on here? Let’s consider first the process of breadmaking. You sow grain seeds, reap the wheat, rye or whatever, thresh the stalks to separate the grain, winnow the grain to get rid of the chaff, grind the seeds to produce flour, mix the flour with water, feed it for a few days until you have an active sourdough starter, take more flour and water, add the starter to it, add some salt, mix well, knead it to activate the gluten so that the dough will expand and the bread will be aerated and light, leave it to rise, punch it down, shape it and leave it to rise again, then bake it in a hot oven, leave it to cool, slice and enjoy. Every time I make bread I marvel at how this process was ever developed. At every point of the process, each step seems counter-productive, or at best not constructive, unless you already know where the process is leading. Not only that: while most cooking involves mixing ingredients that basically retain their essential character, breadmaking is a kind of alchemy. Measure out your flour and water; look at them; taste them. Who would ever imagine that flour is something you would choose to eat? Flour and water are nothing like dough. But when you put them together in a bowl, and mix them, there is a magical moment at which they start to come together. Just when you are wondering whether the flour will ever be absorbed, the scale tips, an invisible line is crossed, and you have…dough. Taste it and you will wonder why you put so much effort into creating this still indigestible, characterless, lump.

Breadmaking is a tribute to the ingenuity, the curiosity, the taste for experimentation, the technological skill, the patience, the imagination, the wit of man. For a believing Jew, all of these are gifts from God. Bread is our staple because it expresses, perhaps better than any other basic food, the partnership between the Creator and his creation, in continuing to create the world. Judaism celebrates two types of creation. The first, the fundamental, is the creation of ‘there is’ from ‘there isn’t’, of something from nothing, which only God can perform, and which is recorded in the creation account at the beginning of Bereishit, Genesis. Once that has taken place, the creation of something from something becomes possible, an ability with which God endowed Man. God created grain, and then created Man, and endowed him with the wherewithal to create, from that grain, bread. We recite the blessing to remind ourselves that it is not through our own unaided efforts, but through the abilities given to us by God, that we have made this bread.When I make bread, I feel myself a privileged player in that partnership. At the deepest level, it is indeed God who brings forth bread from the land. To say that making bread is a religious experience sounds like a wild claim, and not one I would expect a rationalist like myself to make, but there you are. Sometimes the experience trumps the experiencer.

I briefly mentioned sourdough starter earlier; this deserves a post all to itself. A huge mystique has grown up around starters. The internet is full of instructive articles that make growing a starter sound slightly more nerve-wracking than tightrope-walking across Niagara Falls; they describe the feeder and tender’s role as being less like a zookeeper’s and more like an ICU nurse’s. My own experience is that sourdough starters are quicker to develop, and more tolerant of neglect, than usually described.

An active starter is one of those symbiotic miracles of nature. To make a sourdough starter, you mix flour and water together in a jar and leave it out, uncovered or loosely covered. Half a day later, you pour half of the mixture away and add flour and water to replace what you poured away. You carry on doing this until you find the mixture starting to bubble and expand. As this activity increases, it can be a little unnerving, particularly if you are a fan of cheap science fiction. What is actually happening is that the bacteria and yeasts that are all around us in the atmosphere are gathering to graze on the pasture you have prepared for them, and to multiply. The bubbles, as Michael Pollan explains in Cooked*, are simply the manifestation of these micro-organisms breaking wind after a good meal.

The starter, after it has been pre-digested by these organisms, is much more palatable and beneficial to us. The gluten has been broken down so that it is more easily digested; I have been told by mildly gluten-intolerant friends that they have no reaction from sourdough bread. Vitamin B has been added by the micro-organisms. Lactic and acetic acid have been produced; this not only adds depth to the flavour of the bread; it also keeps it fresh longer. My astute readership will have realised that, if the bubbles are wind produced by the organisms, then all of these other beneficial substances are their excretions. That we still can’t wait to eat sourdough bread even after we know how it is produced is testament to its astonishing qualities! For a clear and simple account of the science of sourdough starters, and a no-nonsense explanation of how to grow one, you can watch this 9-minute video.

Because I do not bake bread every day, or even every week, I keep my starter in the fridge. This basically causes the bacteria to hibernate. When I want to bake, I first have to wake the starter up by frequent feedings. While my starter is a bit more listless than I would like, it still delivers flavour and rise to the dough and spring to the bread I bake with it.

At the end of our first trip to Portugal, I decided to conduct an experiment. Not wanting to burden Micha’el and Tslil with having to remember to feed the starter, I took a small quantity, mixed more flour in to make a very dry mix, then froze half, and kept the other half in the fridge. When we returned 3 months later, I brought the refrigerated starter up to room temperature, fed it for a couple of days, and it was then ready to use again. (I think the other half is still in the freezer.) All of this suggests that the recently emergent starter ‘kennels’ or ‘hotels’ may be a scam: starter owners who are going on holiday can take their starter to be looked after in these establishments by skilled handlers. The owners can give specific instructions about storage temperature and feeding regimen.

The revival of artisan sourdough bread owes much to the community of breadmakers in San Francisco. There are stories of sourdough starters that were brought across to America by immigrants 150 years ago, and have been kept alive since. Because a starter attracts organism from the environment, starters in different areas are reputed to develop different aromas and flavours, and the San Francisco strain is very highly regarded. Unfortunately, I will never have a venerable starter to hand on to my children, because of Pesach. Let me explain. Observing Pesach requires us to surrender ownership of all leavened goods for the duration of the festival. Where destroying these goods, throwing them away, or giving them away to a non-Jew does not incur considerable financial loss, this is what is done. For those of us, on the other hand, who have the odd bottle of single malt, a typically subtle solution has been developed; we sell these goods to a non-Jew, and, at the end of the festival, we buy them back. This arrangement is organised in Israel at the national level. Individuals appoint a rabbi as their agent, and a hierarchy leads up to the Chief Rabbi, who sells the entire stock of leaven owned by Jews in Israel to a single non-Jew, payment to be made after Pesach. After Pesach, the non-Jew changes his mind and withdraws from the deal (or at least has done every year so far). However, since a sourdough starter has little monetary value, and since it is about the most leavened thing imaginable, it cannot be included in this arrangement, and must be disposed of. Every year after Pesach, I start again from scratch, and there is a hiatus of 3 or 4 days before I can bake again.

It is widely believed that it was the cultivation of grain that first turned our nomadic ancestors into farmers. To finish, here is our own nomadic hunter-gatherer at work. (Didn’t see the segue coming, did you?)

* A word about Cooked. If there is anyone out there who has not yet encountered this wonderful book (and slightly less wonderful 4-part series on Netflix), then I strongly urge you to read it. If you are at all interested in biochemistry, anthropology, sociology, prehistory, barbecue, pickling, alcohol, cheese, or, indeed, any food or drink, then you owe it to yourself to allow Michael Pollan to wrap you in his enthusiasm. I even found the chapter on roasting a whole pig, while of no practical value to me, absolutely fascinating.