I met a man my age last night and I asked him about his job. He supervises bakers all over the DFW area, driving over a hundred miles every night. Since I teach science and talk about yeast being a fungus, I struck up a conversation with him. Noticing my intent, he stopped in mid-stride, turned, and engaged me with fixed eyes. A smile broke out on his face as he gave me a quick history of the Egyptian discovery of sourdough. He was as earnest as a doctor diagnosing a patient. To most of us bread is the staff of life, but to him it was pure passion, hard science, and the very gift of God to mortal man. I was full already but he made me long to hold, break open, and sniff a warm radiating loaf. He was a bread evangelist, winning my hungry soul with convicting speech; a center-rack dough politician, soliciting my vote with great enthusiasm; a fire-gazer, interpreting the rising brown lifeform with trance-like incantations. I imagined him retrieving a brand new loaf from the oven, gingerly as would a mid-wife, then lifting it up with great pride and care into the arms of its new owner.
Before I left he told me – not once, but twice – to leave any questions I had about bread with the employees at the bakery cafe. He promised to research them out and get the answer back to me promptly. I saw the urgency in his eyes, the delight in his mission-accomplished. He had told one more person about the savory delight, the historical magic, the power and allure of bread. I admired his enthusiasm, his singularity of passion. I was ashamed of my own passive resignation about what I claim to be my one true love.
What if we all were that passionate, that devoted, that earnest about the most essential thing in life. Do we talk about the Bread which came down from heaven like He is the most important thing in our lives?
Give us this day our daily bread, and let us tell the world, every day, especially this day, how good it is!
Lamar Howell's Weblog 
Lamar,
Great post. I love your writing and ideas.
Bonnie
Let us break bread together, on our knees. That was our mantra in Poland, for the bread was sometimes very hard and we treated it like kindling.
When I was a student at KU, I met a guy from K-State who was studying bakery science or whatever the major was called. I remember him telling me about staleness, which he said was inevitable in the first 24 hours and had measurable characteristics.
The dorm I lived in my first two years at KU was a “schol hall”, a cooperative dorm in which we did all the work. I showed up a little late the first semester, after the jobs had been parceled out, so they made me bread baker. I bought a book and discovered that proportions were very flexible, and once I had figured out what dough should feel like, I could just measure the water and do most of the rest by impulse and feel. I used to crank out six loaves twice a week. It was very satisfying. I remember being roused out of a revery more than once by someone who stuck his head into my room to comment on the wonderful smell of baking bread — which I had completely forgotten about and was on the verge of burning!
One of these days I want to make challah again. There’s no bread like it. I would also like to learn to make the wonderful soft white bread that they sold in every little store in Colombia in little white football-shaped loaves. It was pan de cinco (centavos), then pan de diez, then pan de cincuenta, pan de peso, pan de cinco, pan de diez, pan de cincuenta, pan de cien…. Inflation. I have no idea what those little breads cost now. They’re similar to the bolillos you can buy at any Mexican bakery and most grocery stores now, but richer.
Now I have a bread machine. It smells as good, and I don’t have to get my hands messy and keep checking on the rising and baking, but I don’t have that satisfaction of throwing the ingredients together
and actually kneading the dough with my hands and taking care of every step of the process.
Tim
Thanks for the comment. Of all the foods I sometimes crave or fall for, I would give them all up if all I could have would be those delicacies or old-fashioned baked bread. There is nothing like it, and it brings us back to the Creator of wheat and the mystique of seeing acres and acres swaying and betraying the erratic, yet somehow comforting, movements of windgusts.
Hey Dad!
Its funny how you experience ordinary moments but see them in an extraordinary way. Way to think outside the bread box!
Art is the ordinary, revealed.
Witaj Lamar
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