I finally learned to bake a perfect loaf of bread

I spent years trying to solve the mystery. I read books about technique. I tinkered with different materials. I asked professionals for their secrets. I turned the Internet inside out and shook it. I felt that finding the answer would make me self-sufficient in an important way, and so I was relentless.

But even though I’m a trained scientist, I couldn’t unlock the puzzle that literally millions before me had solved. When I finally figured it out, I felt like I had found the magical key in a fairy tale.

What did I do? I made a really good loaf of bread.

This bread isn’t just edible. The crumb is silky, chewy and light. The loaves have the perfect, proud roundness of a chickadee in a birdbath. And when the bread comes out of the oven, the crust sings me a song about its golden, crisp perfection.

I sometimes pay $6 a loaf for bread like this. I’d tried and tried to duplicate it, turning out one flat, doughy lump after another. If the loaf was nicely risen and well-formed, it tasted like wet wheat. If it had good flavour, it was a shapeless mass with uneven crumb that shattered under the bread knife. I was beginning to suspect good bread could only be made by bakers with bionic arms and hellfire-hot ovens. Either that, or it could only be summoned by magic powers.

But now I’ve mastered it. A few simple tricks was all it took: wet dough and a steam-filled oven. Careful shaping of the gluten cloak before proofing the loaf. A slow rise in the fridge to allow the yeast to work its enzymatic magic and give the final product more flavour than simple flour.

My bread is transformed. It has the “custard crumb” that artisan bread makers talk about. The crust is crackling and brown. It has good flavour. And, most importantly, my dough has oven spring worthy of an Olympic pole vaulter. It’s a flat disk when it goes in the oven and a balloon when it comes out, as if it’s bursting with pride, like I am.

Maybe it’s a little ridiculous to be so proud of such a simple accomplishment. It’s just bread. But I could hardly be more pleased if I had learned to lay eggs.

For me, bread represents the holy grail of cooking – how to make the very simplest of food extraordinary. Nothing fancy required. Just me, the yeast, the flour and the water. There are no kitchen robots, either, no bread machine to stir and bake, no mixer to mangle the dough with its hooks. All of the magic is in the technique.

This meditative process of mixing, fermenting, shaping and baking unplugs me from the modern world and lets me travel back through time. I feel filled with a simple human power: to make my own basic food. I’m taking another corner of my table back from the supermarkets and the food processing plants. No more worrying that the bakery will sell out of the loaf I want. Or, worse, that I’ll be stuck eating pre-sliced sandwich bread, the kind you can wad up into pea-sized balls.

So many things these days can only be bought at the store, not made with your own hands. Some of them, like cars, computers and telephones, are the trappings of modern life, and I often wonder if food should fall into the same category.

Learning to bake bread helps me build a bridge to days when food was grown, not processed. People have been making bread for thousands of years. And it’s not just old – it’s important. Growing grains and forming them into edible loaves freed us from the daily grind of hunting and gathering, and set the conditions for the flowering of civilization as we know it. I’m partaking of a ritual that countless generations of mothers, grandmothers and village bakers have performed over the centuries.

It helps me, too, to step away from our present-day economy of intangibles and make something I can touch. I have a knowledge-era job. If the Internet were to vanish tomorrow, most of my work would vanish, too.

I’m fortunate to live in a small community with a vibrant farmers’ market. To sell your goods there, you must make it, bake it or grow it. I dreamed of joining the market as a vendor – and for the past few weeks, with my bread in hand, I have. My loaves are selling well, and each week I’m baking more bread.

It’s a kind of success I have never known – direct and tangible. There’s something satisfying about selling food to the people who will eat it, watching customers tear into a loaf just a step away from the table where they bought it.

Of course, I think of none of this when I’m mixing my bread. Dough making and baking occupy quiet times of the night and morning when my toddler is tucked in his bed, the sky is dark and the only sounds are the ticking of the clock and the occasional croak of a rogue frog in my garden. I am up to my elbows in silk-soft bowls of flour. All I can smell is the musk of yeast cracking out of stasis and getting ready to do some heavy lifting.

My time travel isn’t complete. I’m not baking this in a wood-fired oven. I need a few modern conveniences to produce it – an electric stove, a refrigerator to chill the dough. But these kitchen anachronisms don’t interfere as I measure and meditate, reconnecting with my food.

Kim Ryall Woolcock lives on Saltspring Island, B.C.

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Bread Making with Bill & Sheila