“I’ve noticed,” Ma says, “you don’t bake the same bread twice.”
Huh? I make a quick mental flip of my paltry baker’s catalog — a series of ill-considered adventures with an unvarying motif: flour and failure. That’s when I get it. She’s not talking about bread. It’s about me.
What she means, of course, is that I am a dabbler, a dilettante, a jack of all trades and master of none. As far as observations go, this one is borne out by empirical evidence. What she doesn’t know is that I have been baking basically the same two types of bread this whole time — they just look nothing like each other, often because I follow different recipes, but mainly for my inability to follow instructions to the letter. And so my focaccia, for instance, looks like a lot of things, but hardly ever like the real deal — or at least focaccia as I buy it from a bakery (not locally, I should add, hence the need to make my own).
I should point this out to her, defend myself. But what for? She eats it all the same. My family is very forgiving about my culinary ineptitude. And when I do get something right they can be lavish with their praise, you’d think I’m some culinary genius. It’s a great ego massage, goading me to scale ever greater heights — until I come across that stygian cavern that is the oven and rashly venture inside. Then I crash. Spectacularly. Again.
It’s a cruel world in there.
I don’t blame my oven. I don’t know it well enough to, and have never even bothered to have it calibrated. No one who has tasted my bread will mistake me for a serious baker. How else to explain my focaccia, which grows worse with each new recipe? I could say it is because I’m graduating to ever more sophisticated versions of the bread, but that would be a lie. The latest recipe was actually the simplest, so simple that I actually made it to the mixing/kneading stage (step number two, if you must know) without deviating from instructions. And then I had to stop.
No two ways about it: I had batter, not dough. I’m inept, not stupid. It took a lot of flour to save that recipe, courtesy of a tidbit I somehow managed to retain from one (I do not recall which) of Chef John’s cooking videos: bread dough should peel away from the sides of the bowl before it is ready for the next step. Not that Chef John had not let me down before, but at least that was after the bread came out of the oven.
The focaccia did not look like any I had made before — that goes without saying. It was heavy, dense, and perfectly edible bread, but if you had to guess what it was, good luck (the distinctive scent of rosemary would have helped if the recipe had called for it). My parents were not around that week so I was spared the ribbing. I could have used a mouthful, in any case. That was a lot of bread to go through.
If you’re asking if the sandwich in the photos was any good, I might as well tell you: I should’ve used store-bought sliced white bread instead. That’s twice in a row that I said the same thing about my bread. Maybe it’s a sign for me to seriously re-consider this folly. Enough is enough. I should move on… to bagel, maybe? I have a recipe or two bookmarked.
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