Quick breads

Jack Deatherage

(5/2020) While the Utopian socialist left urges the Oval Office occupant to become the tyrant they have accused him of being since before he was sworn into office, I run bread recipe trials and feed the results to the house dogs. Normally, I'd todder down to the tattoo shop and dump the experiments on one or both the artists working away there. Though sometimes I'd wander a bit farther down the hill to a former town commissioner's house and leave the bread with her family. Rarely would bags of bread reach as far as the librarians that nudge me to keep baking.

With the March bread-building lecture at the library canceled by the state's shutdown order, Librarian Penny suggested I write up some recipes I've modified, successfully, so the L could refer its sudden crop of new home bakers to tried and true recipes built with locally available ingredients. I'd been toying with the idea of a Facebook group wherein I could store the recipes I try - complete with pictures, videos and my thoughts on the breads, cookies, stews, pizzas and egg noodles. (Not that I'm an expert on any of them, but I am getting seniler and occasionally need to refresh my memory concerning foods I like, or not.) So "Emmitsburg's Village Idiot's Kitchen Collection" was born March 26th. I chose such a long name for the group to keep most people from visiting it, assuming they won't type that much- so many being short attention spanned addicts of computer and texting shorthand.

Of course there was a glaring problem. My Facebook account was attached to the recipe group. Library patrons could innocently wander into my nightmare and become traumatized. Librarian Penny asked if I could just trial, record the recipes and send them to her. The librarians would reformat them so the library could use them on one of its own sites. As I was jazzed with jiggering new recipes and building the collection on FB, I didn't much care how the recipes were used by the L - so long as the bread books I worked from got the credit. I sent a couple of easy yeast bread recipes to her as quickly as I could.

Being generally oblivious to the world outside the house, I was surprised to get a request for yeast free breads. Did Penny mean sourdough or quick bread?

"Quick breads." Came her reply. "There is no yeast available in the stores."

What? So off to the supermarkets and grocery stores I wended. (Yes, there are still a few grocery stores around, if you know where to look for them.) What did I see? No yeast for you, or me! Which for me is no great thing as I buy it by the pound, or two pounds when it's on sale. One pound for me and the other gifted to whoever can use it within a year or two. So I have yeast enough.

What really set me back was the flour shelves were all but empty! There were maybe five bags of store brand all-purpose flour left. Which set me to giggling (I do that when no one else is likely to hear me). Really? You all bought the most expensive brands and left the cheap stuff behind, why? Isn't there a chance you'll run out of money if you aren't working?

Of course, the neo-bread builders are likely reading the same books I have, or accessing the same bread building websites I've glanced at- many of which insist you use King Arthur flour for the best results. I couldn't help but giggle. King Arthur bread flour sells for just under $5 a 5-pound bag. Wegmans all-purpose flour, on sale, is $1 for a 5-pound bag. Having trialed the flours side by side, I know the less expensive flour can turn out a bread only a bread fanatic could tell wasn't made with the more expensive flour! Ah well. Cheaper flour for me, and eventually the dogs!

Then South-Central PA Farmer Ed informs me it ain't just a yeast problem. He knows I can have a sourdough culture up and raising loaves in less than a week if needs be.

"Jack, what are you going to do when the flour stops flowing?" Ed was one of them six-figured-income, suit-and-tie guys in another lifetime. He knows how to read spreadsheets and follow money trails. He understands how things work where I barely understand they do work.

He explains how the industrial Ag system is breaking down from the farm, to the processor, to the stores as the virus either reduces the workforce by infection, fear or shutdown orders from on high.

Milk is now being dumped on dairy farms contracted to corporations catering to institutional entities. Vegetables are being turned under in the fields they were grown in because there aren't people to harvest them, or packers to ready them for shipping to contracted buyers who can't sell them to the institutions. Because the institutions are closed! I'm also hearing some industrial meat packing plants are closing shop as the virus works its way through the employees.

Damn. I need to wander out to the farm and see if I can buy grains for bread making! I'd likely have to explore building loaves using barley and spelt, possibly oats and rye. Such grains are mostly alien to me and the methods I currently build by. Still, I've watched a British documentary on Victorian era bread building and understand some of how those grains react to yeast and water. Though the segment on a period of no wheat to mill into flour, and the resulting starvation and how any grain (even poultry feed) was used in the production of the daily loaf, may be of use in coming months. Not that I particularly need bread, but the dogs are probably addicted to it by now.

And just like that I get a clue! The dogs get the dried out breads I can't eat or give away. So what if I build breads that are supposed to be dry when I eat them? Breads like crackers? Rusk? Biscotti? Oo!

Chasing back to truly hard times- the American Civil War - can put current events into perspective. As disgruntled as I am over the library being closed, at least no one is pounding on my door with a rifle butt - demanding I feed them! Though that may change if people aren't soon allowed to be productive again.