‘This is a perfect Tash kitchen,’ came the declaration and I smiled at the sink, my back momentarily turned.
‘Not quite,’ I responded.
‘The perfect kitchen would have an island so I could face out to the living space; where the people are,’ I said.
This has been a summer of nomadic kitchens, stopping in small seaside towns for a night or two, a scattering of days beside the mangroves and a week or more at the orchard. Stanley (the starter) and I have made bread together in more than half a dozen kitchens now. I have learned few of them are perfect, it’s the people that make them perfect. It takes bread to truly understand a kitchen and to make it work, regardless of size or design because in baking bread you work around the kitchen.
You have to take some time to understand the warmest spots for rising and shelf of the fridge works best for an overnight proof. After a few batches, you figure out the dance between where you keep your flour for baking and your starter flour. Baking often enough means you learn a rhythm and a flow, a way of moving through the space so you can laminate, stretch and fold with ease.
Eventually though, you start to wonder whether you are making a home around the bread or is the bread baking a home around you. It’s by instinct, not by design that I find myself baking bread when the idea of home is chasing me like a ghost. By now, I know well enough that home is not the sum of a house, or the land (although it matters) or the people. Home is the space that expands inside the boundaries of those objects of importance.
The land anchors me but the people who hold up that blanket of stars and sky above me wherever I go have become the windows, the shelter and the doorways of passage for my going out and coming in. Wherever I find that space between welcoming hearts and solid, secure bodies for embrace, where I find a kitchen to bake bread then break it. There I find home.
Dough has a language. I love the sound it makes hitting on the bowl as it changes through each stage. The gentle pillowy-ness, the transformation of sticky gluten to smooth or bubbly clouds. It demands your attention but can be left; effortlessly alone to make magic. It reminds me of people – you learn how to judge the moment of interaction and not beat them down too much or too soon, sometimes just to wait a little longer.
Bread doesn’t need much adornment either. A little oil or butter to be shown in its best light. Like the best people – in their simplest form, they are complete. We are drawn to the aroma of fresh baked loaves but mostly, I think we are drawn to the leavening - how yeast creates room for us, whole and wholly alive.
This is also how bread bakes a home. From the moment yeast or starter hits water and flour, a process of inevitability has begun. Rise a little, rise a lot – so long as the culture is alive, then your bread will come to life too. The cycle begins and then it continues. The fermentation fuels the expansion of the loaf, the soft and springy chew, the firm boundary of a crust. Like builders raising a barn roof, leavening does the work of creating space to settle in.
The loaves I’m making today have an awkward beginning. You throw everything into a stand mixer and then mix with a dough hook on medium-high. For the first nine minutes it looks like a lumpy pancake batter, too wet to hold together and not remotely resembling any other dough I make.
It would be easy to give up at this point but you have to have faith that it will come together. Put aside how you expected it to happen and just watch it, beating on and on. Eventually something magic happens and the threads of gluten start to pull away from the bowl and follow the finger pulling them. The grip of the dough swings from the side of the bowl to your hand, with more of a desire to cling to itself than to a foreign object. And then you leave it, in an oiled bowl in that perfectly warm spot you discovering after dancing in your kitchen for hours.
Let it sit, rest and rise – a few hours at least, then slide it gently to the floured bench, cut into two pieces and pull and prod it into the oblong shape you want laid out in a baking tray greased with olive oil and dressed with savoury herbs. It’s a quicker version of a traditional focaccia that works well on a platter or with those grazing dinners. Then dress with olive oil and more sea salt. Dimple the top slightly with your oily fingertips, little dimples of love that let the oil pool gently. Let it rest and rise again until the top is pillowy and soft, where you can see the lift starting to happen. I like to bake these with the oven almost as high as it will go, with a steam bath in the bottom. The steam helps with the initial lift and then I remove it, dropping the heat slightly while the oil then steps up to help give that crust a firm and crunchy bite and a resonant hollow note when you tap the base.
Humans are a lot like bread. We are all better off with a little interaction, a little time invested, a little hope holding on, a little belief and anticipation of the end result. We need a little time to prove and a little heat and steam to fully inflate. Time is the best thing you can do for us. Time to get ourselves together, time to knock the rough to smooth, time to prove. Time to rest and time to rise to the occasion.
Home is still chasing me - right from the present into the future. It’s in the spaces the leavening creates I find it. The leavening is that magical alchemy of land, sky and people where I breathe. So I keep baking bread. Making loaves that rise so diligently, each one a little crusty parcel of home that spills out into the people I’m surrounded with.