My Pain (French for bread not the back ache…)

I am not quite sure why I started this blog, actually it’s a second home from my first love cooking I suppose.Having been a son of an artist I guess creating with my hands as well as what was or wasn’t on or in my mind led me to baking bread, with a voracity or as my brother would say “a yeast infection!” Blaming or thanking my parents for there cultural diversity is one thing, being born in Europe and living most of my life in the USA is another! First my mother is a Borgia (oh yeah, the Lucrezia and Cesare kind of Borgia!), my fathers family were still trying to figure out, descendants of the diaspora they lived in many places and had different names, sometimes to avoid military service; all of us ended up joining the services, go figure were really soft at heart liberals?

I digress! Someone recently told me that baking is an abstract thought rather than a physical labour, ok? Tell that to the people on there feet in the wee hours of the night/morning toiling to prepare a truly magical loaf or a few thousand!As an artists son who’s father was an abstract painter, I sort of don’t think of it so, even in art there are methods and techniques that one requires to put forth those ideas in clay or canvas, whatever the medium we have rules! As far as the enjoyment or adoration of ones craft it seems fairly simple or I am truly an idealist of the most ridiculous kind, baking bread  is the pleasure of  the uncertainty or the more raw  instinct, beauty. It’s sort of like an excercise,there is pain and ecstasy,  at least for myself  the waiting is the worst part, a pseudo-sexual metaphor!Even though the long fermentation makes the bread more delicious. Reading a book of Poilaine I saw and realized that symbols permeate bread culture, and for whatever we learn and want to do in bread we must take the first steps in learning it’s quiet language, the gentle caress of the dough, folding and resting, leaving it to it’s own inoxicated state to levitate from a hard mass to a pillow (all depends if it’s German, French, Italian,etc..)and the the sacrificial fire to set it like a ceramic in a kiln! and to remove and listen to the crackling tune and the sweet aroma induced by the trapped gases!