The Necessary Bakery

today's maple-pecan scones, just out of the oven

When I began typing this post, I could already smell the maple-pecan scones I'd mixed and popped into the oven about fifteen minutes ago. Ohio maple syrup. A cup of pecan halves. Organic flours (oat, wheat, white). Etc.

I eat a homemade scone nearly every morning--and have done so for a few years now. It's become, well, necessary--not for any pecuniary reason, not even for reasons of health (although I use Egg Beaters and vegetable "butter," etc.). It's psychologically necessary now.

I am not a professional baker. I've learned what I know by trial-and-error; I still make errors; I'm still learning. Occasionally I still dazzle myself when I discover something I should have known years ago.

Example: Just a couple of weeks ago I realized that if I left my bread dough going with the dough hook in the mixer a bit longer that I had been, adding more and more flour, that soon it would achieve such a robust consistency that I wouldn't really need to add more flour when I was kneading it afterward. (I knead the bread dough 100 times after I remove it from the mixer.)

As my Facebook friends know, I bake sourdough bread every Sunday morning using starter I bought in Skagway, Alaska, back in August 1986 when my son, Steve (14 at the time), and I flew there to explore sites related to The Call of the Wild (which I'd begun teaching my 8th graders, Steve among them) and to check out sites mentioned in the diary of my great-grandfather Addison Clark Dyer, who had gone on the Klondike Gold Rush, the Rush that figures prominently in Wild.

That starter is still alive in our refrigerator, waiting coolly to be fed and used every week. I often give bread to my son and his family (who live only about a half-hour away), and sometimes I have so many loaves in the fridge (and freezer) that I bake something else instead--muffins, waffles, pancakes. (I just gave a bunch of frozen waffles to Steve; they didn't last long, I heard.)

Now and then I also bake baguettes--not sourdough, just the plain old flour, water, salt, yeast. We like to have them when we have spaghetti, perhaps Joyce's favorite meal. (This I learned early, early in our marriage.)

As I said above, all of this baking, for me, is therapeutic. As I'm doing it, I feel myself becoming ... ageless. I began baking yeast bread in 1970, the first months of our marriage (shifted to sourdough in 1986), and have been doing it ever since.

So when I start a baking project now--getting the ingredients ready, mixing, shaping, etc.--I feel the years slip away. It is 1970 again, and I have just married the most wonderful human being, and we both are healthy and hopeful, and later, perhaps for supper, we will break bread once again. And Time will not begin to accelerate until the morning, and he will do so until I stop him once again by donning my apron, grabbing a sack of flour, some sea salt, ...