Making Bread and the Small Marvels of Homemaking

It is an everyday miracle to make sourdough bread. From water, flour, a little salt, and natural yeast growing quietly in a jar comes a complex product. The loaf emerging from the oven takes on a deep hombre of crusty browns, dusted with flour. Under a thick, sheltering crust lies a chewy middle registering a range of sour and sweet flavors. To make something so varied and interesting from ingredients so unassuming is one of the legitimate surprises hiding in plain sight for the world-weary.

The process of making bread involves that balm of objective work that reconnects us to our embodied selves. Shaping a well-formed dough, whether sourdough or any other bread or pastry, is a deeply satisfying exercise engaging the senses. As with many practical things, all most of us need to do to learn basic breadmaking is to follow a recipe. And then follow it again and again. There is no masterclass or gnostic knowledge required. Simply making the bread again will lead to improvements, sometimes subtle and incremental, sometimes surprising and dramatic.

Some people strategize and take on tasks like breadmaking with intellectual verve. This is not necessary. For some of us, laying aside intellectual considerations and simply getting our hands in the dough, learning to anticipate by feel and aroma, are a much-needed return to the material world.

It was fascinating to watch how in widescale lockdowns, people gravitated to the arts of homemaking, renovation, and gardening. When forced to spend time in their living space, people tend to do beautifying and interesting things. It’s now bewildering that so many people have all but forgotten that moment in time. Two years on people will say vaguely, “Oh yeah, I forgot that happened,” about the uncertain weeks of bullying public health dictates. Overtaken by a blur of ordinary activity, the brief experience of being at home and what it inspires is but a hazy memory difficult to recall.

Not everyone has moved on, especially since not everyone began baking bread merely when there was a viral threat on the horizon. There is a passionate contingent that pursues sourdough bread making, gardening, goat raising, and soap production with an air of religiosity. While it can be overwhelming to listen to people passionate about their garden, their backyard chickens, and their kombucha fermenting under the kitchen sink, one need not adopt all these eccentric hobbies at once. Trying one and sticking with it is enough. Thankfully, people have laid out helpful considerations about what is worth doing yourself and what is worth letting someone else do.

We can take encouragement from meeting people who are so excited about life. Hope is a contagion just as much as any virus, and watching people enjoy the experience of living buoys us. We think that we are besieged by evil technologies and dangerous people, but the more important phenomenon is absence. A life in which someone spends hours gazing into a screen, obsesses about trivialities, and lets emotional wounds fester is often a life missing interesting activity, engaging reading material, and, above all, warm and rich relationships. What does baking bread naturally invite? Sharing bread so as not to eat an entire loaf on your own.

An interesting tension exists between the online resources encouraging “simple,” “natural” living and the process people go through to produce such resources. Anyone delighted by the truth seeks to evangelize, and it is understandable to want to share information and a way of life that is beautiful and worthwhile. The glory of a well-formed dough translates well to many media. For sensory-starved phone addicts, watching someone else handle a golden orb of soft dough is secondhand living at its finest. But is that helpful?

One tired-eyed mother about to “retire” from the limelight of YouTube at the ripe age of 20-something explained what goes into filming and editing, the total lack of social engagements outside the home because of her need to orchestrate these videos, and the grind of producing them week-in and week-out. What she observed is worth considering. There is nothing extraordinary about a mother at home baking bread. What is excessive is the process of filming it and sharing it.

In an age obsessed with identity, sharing ourselves, and receiving validation, we can think that the carefully choreographed video sequence of our lives, the mess shoved just off-screen, is a normal part of living. It is not. Take the bread, leave the video. Simple living as a performative art defeats the purpose. The quiet pleasures of homemade, simple, and delightful do not stand up to the artificial noise of the internet. We may think we’re making other people’s lives better with our sharing, but without careful consideration, we may just be making our own lives worse.

The assignment is simple: Find someone harboring an active sourdough culture. Get your hands on the starter. Feed it; watch it grow. Learn to bake bread through trial and error. Enjoy it; share it. And the most important part of the challenge is that you take no video and no photographic evidence. Return to the quiet miracles of homemaking that require only an audience of one. And your family will enjoy the bread, too.