Cilley: The Zen of bread-making

My mother has many talents, cooking isn’t one of them. A competency stamped on her siblings’ DNA was lost on her. That’s not to say she couldn’t put together a nutritious, if rather bland and tasteless, meal. But baking, that was another story altogether. The steps of the most basic recipe were a foreign language and the results as discordant as that from a novice linguist.

I learned early that if I wanted to enjoy tasty treats from our underused oven I had better learn to navigate a cookbook and our kitchen. I was just 9 years old when I took the plunge into Toll House cookies and not long after into pies. By 15 I was making bread, an activity that transported me into an alternate state of being. It wasn’t coincidence then that by my 20s I had acquired my Tassajara Bread Book, a Zen method of bread-making, a way of becoming one with the bread – “Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination running through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself...”

Getting into the spirit of the Tassajar Bread Book requires giving oneself over body and soul to the process of bread-making. Just the thought of cutting corners or using a bread-making machine would be a sacrilege. A paucity of time is anathema to the bread-making journey. Thus, as life became fuller with spouse, children and work, the Bread Book became less a weekly source of comfort and inspiration and more an annual trip down memory lane.

Unbidden though it may have been, one of the things the current pandemic has restored is time at home, lots of it for some of us. Early on in the “stay at home” era I decided for both emotional and strategic reasons (i.e., if there were shortages of toilet paper, bread was sure to be next!) that it was a good time to dust off the Bread Book. All I needed was some yeast, once a staple in my home, and some additional flour, still a staple but not in serious bread-making quantities. That was on March 13. Imagine my surprise to find only two off-brand packages of yeast and empty shelves where flour was once piled high. Writing this off as panic-buying, I was certain the situation would shortly rectify itself. It’s now June and these items are still scarce.

Turns out I was hardly in the minority in my desire to fire up the oven. Collectively, we’re baking a LOT more at home and that is pushing suppliers of milled grains to their maximum capacity. The producers of the well-known King Arthur Flour, headquartered in our neighboring state of Vermont, saw a virtual overnight 600% increase in the demand for their product and a surge in calls to their Baker’s Hotline from fledgling bakers.

Social media is replete with evidence of this spate of cooking, especially bread-making. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are flooded with pictures of “first loaves,” challenging the more faint of heart. In turn, this has given rise to harsh words between veteran bakers and the newly minted. In one recent exchange a Tweeter accused those who were buying up flour as “snatching food from her family’s mouths.” The clear message was stick to the store-bought stuff and leave bread-making to serious bakers like the writer. I confess to having a wee bit of sympathy despite my inconsistent relationship with my oven.

The reasons for the sudden interest in bread-making don’t appear to be strictly driven by having additional time or as a way to resurrect childhood memories. In fact, many of the new arrivals were raised by working parents who didn’t themselves spend a great deal of time in the kitchen. Rather, according to Dr. Stephen Soreff, a retired psychiatrist and journalist in Nottingham, with published research on the psychological effects of the 1918 pandemic, this is a coping mechanism for a set of unprecedented circumstances for which we have no mental models.

“This is an atavistic human response to survival. It is tribal and arises from our hunter-gatherer instincts. At the heart of it is ‘I want my family to survive and I can make the basic sustenance of life to ensure their survival.’” Dr. Soreff notes that in a similar vein there has been a run on home improvement supplies for which there is no urgency. “This reflects the guarding instinct,” he says. “It is the shoring up of our fortress, our homes, for our family.”

I’m not sure how many loaves are needed to ensure the survival of the family or of the species, but I am hoping suppliers catch up to demand so that I can get the flour I need. My own coping mechanism is the ability to get into the Zen of bread-making, to transcend this stressful, difficult space and time to one of higher enlightenment and calm. So, to those who are buying up all the flour – please stop snatching the Zen right out of my life!

Jackie Cilley is a former state senator from Barrington and a member of Seacoast Media Group’s editorial board.