Really, it's the darndest thing.
For years, I was quite unable to make bread, despite having made it over and over, when I was a young mother. I'd thought all this time that it was because I'd developed an allergy to yeast and the universe was trying to tell me something. I've been pretty obtuse to these things (messages from the universe) in my life, on many occasions. I'd therefore convinced myself that bread wasn't all that good for the human body anyhow, and I didn't sweat it. I mean, it's not like Vermont is not the artisan bread baker oasis of the entire US, which makes for plenty of reasonable opportunities to just buy really good varieties of the stuff.
So, yea. I didn't miss having the connection to fermentation that I had when I was young. Not too much, anyway.
I did sort of lament dumping expensive ingredients of my two winemaking and one mead attempts, since then. It's pretty disheartening when you don't know what you've done wrong, until 10 gallons of fermentation just don't, well........ work out. And of course, there's really no expert to be found to help, or show you how to fix your mistakes. I suppose there's a metaphor to life, in there, somewhere.
Anyway, I guess that's neither here nor there, and it's time to move on to the positive outcomes. For the pumpernickel bread, I'd actually sprouted some rye seed, which made it quite interestingly chewy. I also deviated from the recipe in The Gluten-Free Gourmet, and added some corn-meal that needed to get used up. Not having a really great bread pan, as I'd given away the aluminum ones I had, filled with treats, for Christmas, I ended up using smallish muffin/loaf type pans for some of it. These actually came out better then the dilapidated big loaf I had made. (I ended up piecing together two aluminum pans and lining them with foil, for the large loaf). In light of the fact that the little ones were so much better, I may just skip the big loaf altogether, in future, and make all little ones.
The little ones remind me of being a youngest child of six, in an extremely impoverished household, where scarcity was the order of the day. Every so often, however, my grandmother would come over on a Friday night, with little loaves of bread with our initials scratched in them. My grandmother probably wasn't the most grandmotherly woman, having serious and deep-seated psychological issues of her own, (my mother went to her deathbed resenting her for many of them), but in this one regard (of realizing that the only way the youngest child's needs would be attended); she rocked! It's one of my fondest memories, and more then likely one of the reasons I bake so much, today.
The life metaphor to be found in this is the thing I've always said:
"It's the little stuff that'll kill ya'. It's also the little mercies that will set you free and allow you to soar".
There weren't too many of these little mercies to be found in my childhood, but the ones that came right when they were most necessary, well, they were literally lifesavers. Some only metaphorically speaking, it's true, but the fact that they were there, cloaked in mystery sometimes, but present nonetheless, is probably also why I became mainly Buddhist, in my approach to life.
Well, yea, so, having made successful pumpernickel bread might not set anybody free, or send them soaring (except for maybe their taste buds), but I am encouraged enough to keep trying. Maybe I was STILL being obtuse and the message was not as complicated as a yeast allergy, but more subtle then that, and directing me towards a gluten one, instead.
Well, just goes to show, when someone has spent a great deal of their lives being mostly obtuse, subtleties are a bitch to learn about. :)
Signing off from Rara Avis Fine Foods @ The House of Found Goods.
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