It's official

I am in a bad mood.
It started up last night, but I was tired from a long day and had a headache so I had hopes it would go away by morning. The tired is gone, and the headache is gone, but the mood remains. I am beset by the awareness of problems that I am unable to fix and which no one else is bothered by. (Thus proving that I am both lame and imagining things.) I am asked to do things that I don't want to do by friends I can't refuse. I am confronted with reminders that it is more important to be popular than it is to be virtuous or intelligent.

Matters are not helped by the events of yesterday, when somone who should have gotten fired instead got something akin to a promotion. I should be happy that at least it is no longer my payroll being wasted, but what is the point of being a good worker when being a bad one has no penalties? I was in an argument with the general manager a few years back when she complained that I was treating something as if it were a moral issue. When is 'how will we treat our subordinates?' NOT a moral isssue?

I'm going to work now. There is bread that needs to be baked, and that at least I can claim competency in.

Leaves from a Baker's Notebook: Attitude Adjustment

Yesterday I noticed that we had run out of salt-free whole wheat bread. This is a bread we don't offer fresh--not enough demand--but the people who need it, need it, so we keep a supply in the freezer section of grocery and bake more whenever we run out. Thus, my first task today was to bake more salt free. Tara was already busy doing something when I came in (actually, she was busy doing two or three somethings--that's how she rolls), so this time I got to bake it.

Salt has multiple roles to play in bread. The first is, it makes it taste better. Our salt-free whole wheat is identical to our regular in every respect but one, but you can easily taste the difference between the two: the salt-free is flatter to the taste. More importantly (to a baker), salt acts to strengthen the gluten strands and to slow down the yeast. This means several things. The dough for the salt-free whole wheat always feels slightly gummy in the mixing bowl, even when it has enough flour added to it. This makes it hard to judge the water/flour balance in the dough. It also means that the dough will rise very rapidly--and deflate catastrophically if the baker doesn't keep an eye on it. There's really no salvaging a dough that has over-proofed.

As a result, our salt-free bread usually comes out looking slightly short and somewhat more lumpy than our regular whole wheat. Unless I make it.

That last statement sounds vain, but bread baking in the one thing I'm willing to be vain about. When I am in the zone, I am untouchable. And if I'm making bread I'm probably in the zone.

So I mixed up the dough, adding just a handful of extra flour after six minutes kneading. I let it rise until it was a round pillow-form, and then scaled the dough and shaped it into loaves. I prepped the chocolate chip scones and cut granola bars as it rose the second time, making sure that Alex understood that when the bread was ready I was evicting his bread crumbs from my oven. (Over the years I have managed to lay down the kitchen law that bread gets right-of-way with the ovens. Because bakers do what the yeast says, and not the other way around.) When they were ready to go in--I can tell by touch--I docked them and slid them into the oven.

After 25 minutes of baking I pulled them out to rotate them. They were tall and perfectly rounded. "Ta da!" I said to Tara, showing them to her. "So that's salt-free," she said, her voice heavy with mock-skepticism. I grinned. "You saw me put the dough together." She just shook her head. I didn't think to tell her then, but I'll try to remember tomorrow: Talent is good, but skill is better. Skill takes time, that's all. Someday she will be where I am now.

In the meantime, my bad mood lightened up.