Faith, Patience and Brown Bread

I have learned that bread making, like so much in life, requires patience. The end result of my bread making last weekend was completely edible, but would have been considered a "bad batch" by my mother. I traced the error to the first rising while the bread was in the bowl. I do believe it is important to let the dough rise, and it is even better if you can punch it down, and allow it to rise back up again.  This produces a lighter loaf.
It can take quite awhile, a few hours, for the bread to rise. Although it can be slow, and one can lose hope, the bread will eventually rise. My Grandfather from New Zealand learned this lesson in bread making when he visited Canada in the early 1970s. My Grandfather made only the one trip to Canada but he and my Grandmother stayed a few months. My Grandparents were a fun loving couple and brought a lot of laughter to the farm during their visit. They both had been involved in theatre in their youth and still enjoyed to put on little plays. I remember one play where they reenacted our neighbor, Dick Elgood, killing a bobcat that was trying to come through the window of his house. The bobcat, for some reason, had been stuffed, and they had it sitting on the front lawn. My Grandmother, not in costume thus she had a summer dress on, had a large gun and was inching her way towards the stuffed bobcat.
My Grandfather had decided that during his stay he would learn to make my mother's brown bread. He had become discouraged by the slowness of the dough rising, and had decided that he had made an error. He took the dough out to the garden and buried it.  A few hours later, to everyone's amazement, the dough rose right through it's garden grave, proving that bread does require faith and patience.

My Grandparents and I standing in the garden where the dough was buried.

Nobody warned me about the bread,

the sweetness of the yeast,

how the bread grows all by itself, in a warm corner of the room.

As if it was alive.

Even when you punch it down, it rises back up, twice it’s size.

The resilience.

The soft rolling on the flour, a temporary submission into tidy pans.

But the forever rising, growing, is unexpected.

It cannot be left alone.

Finally in the oven the loaves are frozen.

They come out hard crusted. Brown bread of course.

With grains.

Even in this state they are somewhat formidable, lined up on the counter.

As if they had not forgotten their wild growth, the freedom of reaching into the sky.

Making bread was more than I bargained for.