But does it actually taste All That Much Better?
I daresay I am not the only person sighing and rolling my eyes at the intelligence that the humble and ancient art of breadmaking is being disrupted: bread-baking in America has, of late, found a friend in the unlikeliest of people: engineers, technologists, and the Silicon Valley-centric and adjacent.
I.e. blokes who need a whole lot of very expensive specialised equipment along with spreadsheets etc in order to make that simple thing that people have been making for millennia, a loaf of bread.
And how is that a relaxing break from their stressful lives? This is like those columns one reads where people are maximising their moments of leisure like they were some industrial process they were making more efficient, reading their x number of pages a day, making their y number of steps, and one suspects enjoying none of it except, perhaps, the vague sense of accomplishment of ticking each thing off the list.
There is a very nice chapter in one of Laurie Colwin's books - I'm not sure if it's Home Cooking or More Home Cooking, in which she makes the world-shattering discovery, breadmaking, not an enormous faff, can be fitted around whatever else you are doing, very forgiving, it's hard not to end up with something edible.
(Honestly, even if your crust springs or cracks or the loaf is a funny shape, it's usually very nice to eat.)
Okay, I have my own little whimsies around breadmaking: instant yeast is An Abomination, fresh yeast is the desideratum, I can bear with dried in an emergency. US recipes nearly always (Colwin excepted!) have too much in the way of sweeteners and too much salt. Etc etc.
But, o dear, such performativity about the thing: it's enough to make one swear off breadmaking and adhere to a regimen of sliced white. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2850295.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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