So cute, I just wanna pinch its doughy little cheeks

From Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Bread":

Bread,
you rise from flour,
water and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother's
rounded womb,
and earth's
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!


I've baked several different batches of bread by now, and I always love putting my palm on the risen bread dough: each soft, smooth orb always feels so warm and alive (which, I suppose, it is). Bread is something elemental and essential, and it's amazingly, perfectly simple. Neruda's poem expresses this idea so beautifully I had to include a excerpt here.

Flour, salt, yeast, water. I messed up the proportions a lot this time, as I got distracted and lost count while I was measuring out the flour and may (or may not) have added an extra cup. Not yet experienced enough to figure out by touch, I added more water to the dough, a little less than a cup. Which I then determined was too much, so I then added in one more cup of white whole wheat flour. In the end, I believe I had either 6.5 or 7.5 cups of white bread flour, 1 cup of white whole wheat flour, 4 cups of water, 1.5 tablespoons salt, and 1.5 tablespoons yeast. I let this mixture rise for 3.5 hours instead of 2 before putting it in the refrigerator.

I also kneaded the dough quite a lot while forming the loaves for the second rise, as I felt I had failed to adequately mix in the extra white whole wheat flour. I figured I would just let them rise again longer, until those yeasty beasties properly inflated the dough again.

The surprise was that despite all my botches, the bread was delicious: crackly crust; chewy, moist crumb; bright, warm flavor. The difference in taste from past batches must be due to the higher proportion of white flour to white whole wheat, as no other ingredients changed (the water-to-flour ratio would only really affect texture. Or maybe there was a fainter yeast taste because the same amount was distributed over more flour/water?)

In any case, I gave one loaf to my family and sliced up most of the second loaf to store in the freezer. And some, well, I just ate standing over the counter, savoring each warm bite of chewy, crackly bread.