My Life as a Doughboy

Even as the flour is licked off my leg by the dog, you will never really get the dough out of my head. The many facets of life shining each week since Halloween 2007 come down to one prescient fact - my dog loves leftover flour on his dad and our family loves slicing into the many three pound loaves of potato, wheat, sourdough and olive bread which gather on our baker's rack every day. Consider this blog post dusted with flour flecklets, just like my bed, my laundry bin, my car, my journal, my bookbag, etc...

I began as a former, not the opposite of latter, but rather as one who forms dough. It came out of tubs having risen over time and was spread out on a thick wood table, floured, and then cut and weighed on a scale. And then the little parcels of wet dough were thrown in front of me, one every 5 seconds, piling up as I quickly rolled each into football-like shapes, balls (or boules), and loaves (like really large burritos) or pulled out like a massive floured flattened square to be later divided into rolls. Variety after variety of dough was slung in my direction, kneaded into these forms with my hands, a calculated dusting of flour following each one as it was placed into a little basket or onto a canvas sheet, then onto wooden boards 5-6-8-10 per board, the boards going onto racks, each rack holding 10-20 boards, each style of bread requiring 1-10 racks. In the end, you have cut/formed/stored nearly 3500 pieces of bread in a smattering of hours, flouring yourself silly in the process.

I would talk to the dough, asking it why it was cut in a way that would make it harder for me to make it the shape it was destined to be. What's your problem dough? And the background music... when people bring their iPods to work and plug them into one of the three flour-tarred boomboxes, it's bliss. But when the radio comes on, you are left to chance, and when the AM ethnic music station plays... well, you are guaranteed to hear the same dozen songs at least 10 times per shift (that's once an hour at least), making you feel that either you are simply not capable of knowing how good those 12 songs are for obvious reasons, or there are only 12 really good songs in that genre. Because I heard them so often, and even after 4 years of high school training in that language, I swear that one of them has a verse that goes "Dijonaaaaaaaaise for Emperor Hirohitoooooo... oh dijona-a-a-a-aaaaaise for Emperor Hirohito-oh-oh-oh-ooooo!" There's one, called Estos Celos, and it's become one of my favorite songs. I have an entirely different music video for it in my head.

So, after you've racked all that potential bread into its varied receptacles to all kinds of music, you must let it rise before it gets baked, what they/we call proofing. You take the racks and pull plastic sheets over them for a spell. No one ever told me the science behind this, so I would take a plastic cover and hold it over a rack as if to ask Y or N?, and would then put it on or toss the bag depending on the answer. It took a month before I really understood why some breads got this treatment and some didn't, but then it all became clear quickly once I was moved from the "bench" into the starting lineup, becoming one of the chief bakers of all this bread. Watcher of rising dough, maker of golden caramelized crust, waylayer of burning and blackened badness.

Hot weather makes dough rise faster, and colder weather makes it rise slower. But rise it will, over time. So, based on the temperature of the flour and the water in the mix, the resulting dough has a built-in speed to its rising, and you control the gas and brake pedal with the use of plastic covers (to create humidity and heat) or refrigerators (to cool the proofing down to a crawl) - all in the hands of the baker. So, bakers "visit" the dough every hour or so, checking on its rise, its acceptance of air and fermentation, asking it to rise faster or please slow down, cursing it like the living thing it is.

Also in the hands of the baker: razor blades. And if you don't know yet, I have (since Y2K, and unintentionally) sliced my thumb to the bone carving sugar cane, folded a blade over my right forefinger carving a wooden spoon in the middle of a snowy nowhere, and sliced off the side of my pinkie cutting an apple... and I now wield a razor blade for a living, making 1, 3, 6, or 8 slices across the tops of hundreds of loaves each night? I proudly tell you, there is no hemoglobin in my bread - nope, only long beautiful slices (bakers call them "scores") atop each loaf, giving the expanding dough room to grow in 460 degree heat for 30 minutes or so and thus creating those crisp little half circles on the crust that you know and love. The angle of the blade matters more than anything, I think, at least to me, and sliding the razor over and over over white dough is a rhythm of life even if you should not be trusted with blades.  Oh ye of little faith.

Truth is, the baker really is the president of bread, in the I'm-George-Bush-The-Decider version of president. You have the mixer making the dough, the formers forming it, hours and hours of prep getting the dough ready just to be baked, and then you, the doofy baker who forgets to check on the dough, simply lets it proof too long and destroys all that work. Overproofed dough, when baked, becomes bread more rock-like than buoyant and less dark since the yeast had all that time to eat the sugars (which are what caramelize to make the dark crust), and it's also harder to score neatly with those aforementioned razor blades, resulting instead in ill-shaped lines resembling chainsaw slices rather than neat Sweeney Todd scalpel nicks. And, like everyone knows, things forgotten in ovens burn and become basura, Spanish for garbage. All of this is in the bakers' hands, and set, again, to the backdrop of sweet iPod music (perhaps some Bob Marley or Portishead or Beethoven), good radio (the oldies station loves Led, the Stones and Queen), or bad radio ("Emperor Hirohito"), ushering you into the early morning hours when you finally get to drag out the oven vacuum, sweep the day's flour and crumbs into the garbage and head out the back door, picking up a few loaves of extra bread for home on your way out.

This is how (parts of) Seattle gets its (really excellent) bread, day into night after day into night, and this is how a doughboy was born and raised for almost a year now. At home, the dog gets his tasty licks off my forearms even as I've cut down to part-time, and we continue to make the best sandwiches on the block with bread I kept around perfection during its journey from the mixer to our cutting board. And if you ever mention the word "bread" to my mother for the rest of her life, she will tell you that her son once made the most amazing bread, that he gave her all these loaves when they drove 1500 miles to visit, that she tried to share the goodness with her friends at church but that her husband wouldn't let her, and that they still have some in the deep freeze... you wanna try some?