Yes, they’re Beautiful, Bold, and Brilliant. But who knew that the Bread Baking Babes, whose monthly exploits take them into the far-reaching corners of the global oven, were also Beastly, Brutal, and just plain Bad? That’s the only conclusion I’m left with after undertaking my first bread as a newly-inaugurated Babe. Consider me duly hazed.
Here’s the thing: this bread contains no flour.
When you bake bread with flour, the miller has done a lot of work on your behalf. She has selected the right wheat berries at just the right stage of development, tempered the flour for the proper moisture content, and maybe added malt so the dough will ferment at the right rate. When you bake with no flour, you’re kind of on your own.
Gee, thanks, Babes! Love you too. Do I now have to streak across campus in order to be fully ordained into Babehood?
The procedure goes something like this: You don your Birkenstocks. You sprout some wheat berries. You whirl them up in the food processor with some yeast, salt and honey, and work it by hand a little to make a pretty nice dough. You let it rise a few times and bake it in a pan. You get a heavy, dense, gummy-in-the-middle but crumbly-at-the edges, whole-wheat loaf that transports you back some [mumble mumble] years to your college co-op days when everyone wanted to volunteer for weekly bread-baking because it beat toilet-cleaning, but no one really knew how to do it.
But here’s the other thing: it’s really not half-bad, considering the no-flour thing.