Harden & Crack (Morris)

First, it was a little artisan bread, a simple flour, salt, water, yeast mixture. Then I moved on to the sourdough starter that prior to the pandemic enjoyed a level of notoriety unbefitting the pickle jar I brought it to life in. Seven days later, a sourdough loaf that wasn’t sour or whatever. I made a traditional – and crusty – European Boule. I massaged pizza crust into existence from an amorphous dough blob and rolled sourdough baguettes that, on a technicality, set off the smoke alarm, unsettled the dog. I have designs to make Japanese Milk Bread rolls that start with a process called Tangzhong and then a Pan au Levain. As collateral damage, I’m learning French(ish) words. I also googled the biga method and what is a poolish? while the confirmed cases of – and deaths from – the coronavirus grew in Ohio.

There were reports of mass runs on baby chickens for backyard coops. Online home and garden retailers sold out of vegetable seeds for impromptu “victory gardens” that harken back to wartime America during WWI and WWII. Resource hoarding, too, became prevalent: toilet paper, rice, beans. At the local Whole Foods, some sociopath even wiped out all the ranch dressing from the shelves – the definition of “essentials” remains fluid. Breadmaking enjoyed a revival and while also logical, the process is reflective of the pandemic. The slowness of it coupled with uncertainty. The total transformation and the many things that go wrong and the seemingly unpredictable results. There’s also spread and growth and a frequent but temporary stillness.

My breadmaking was not necessitated by fear of hunger, a real pain the marginalized and economically depressed feel both in quarantine and, unfortunately, during times of general prosperity. I do not need the bread (or its puns) and I have not been hoarding (much) King Arthur’s Flour and Red Star yeast. I do not (yet) harbor fears related to the collapse of the global markets – not that bread assuages chaos of that magnitude. Quarantine is a challenge, but I acknowledge that mine is a relatively privileged one – as far as quarantines go. I’ve sheltered-in-place and practiced social isolation without the dilemma of choosing between health and financial stability. I have not been laid off or furloughed, and continue to work through the crisis, the kitchen table an ad hoc office space. The dogs are unruly and, at times, toxic coworkers who shit in the yard (not the weirdest coworker behavior I’ve ever encountered) and require prompt feedings – not unlike the infantile sourdough starter I grew in the de-labeled Vlasic jar on the counter. 

Breadmaking, though, has ordered my Sunday afternoons and a few days in advance the deeper I get into the practice. Bread is a new hobby or routinized activity, a subconscious level of control, and a focal point for the anxious mind. I am anxious by nature, making me either entirely prepared for the pandemic or completely ill-prepared for the pandemic. I am not patient, either – I’m irritated by slowness and put off by inertia, two characteristics unbecoming of someone endeavoring to make bread or outlast a global crisis.

I never held strong opinions about bread prior to the coronavirus outbreak. Bread was never much more than a vehicle for more interesting food, like corned beef or spinach dip. As a high schooler and undergrad, I cut my teeth in the workforce by rolling out premade pizza dough balls and reheating complimentary house bread at a chain Italian restaurant – neither memory flutters my heart with an immense fondness. But bread dough now fills a space where I used to go rock climbing or hiking or simply wander rudderless through the grocery store mulling, what turns out, was a laughable and insignificant existential crisis in normal times: what to pack for lunch this week or do I have enough deodorant to make it to Friday? In the current crisis, a trip to the grocery store is itself an existential crisis: Will this trip to Giant Eagle kill me? Is buying beef jerky and cat litter worth it?

In the absence of normal times, there is some stage of breadmaking in process: the fermenting or rising, where weekends previously pivoted on activities that didn’t require viewing my fellow citizens as virus-filled monsters undeserving of social interaction – the same way, I assume, they view me when we meet in public, both hiding behind masks.

So bread, then. And pacing while the dough proofs in the small ray of sun that hits the kitchen counter in mid-afternoon or as the crust hardens and cracks in the oven – like many of us, hardening or cracking.

Eric Morris lives and writes in Akron, Ohio.