Split

eye of the bread

In a poorly lit temple museum in Japan, there’s a thousand-year-old sculpture in unpainted wood of a monk caught at the moment of enlightenment, his face splitting open like a cicada’s shell to reveal the monk beneath. This reminded me of that. In the first ten minutes after it goes into the oven, the dough experiences a burst of expansion before the heat kills it — or, if you like, transforms it into its next, immobile state. Many bakers, disliking irregularity, cut slashes into the dough so it will split where they want, and sometimes I do this too, but most of the time I prefer to be surprised by what opens and what stays closed.

19 Replies to “Split”

  1. a powerful comparison with the split bread and the monk’s face. and i like the alternate you provide to the heat killing: “transforms it into its next, immobile state.”

    1. In fact it did turn out really well, if I do say so myself. Almost every batch of bread I make now is rye, because I love how it tastes when it’s fresh out of the oven.

  2. Yes, warm rye bread is one of the lost pleasures!

    I don’t think this piece is any the worse for not being in lines. It’s a perfect piece, not a word out of place. (And the image is great!)

    1. Wow, thanks. But you know my lust for poems is not exactly rational. It did occur to me last night that readers might enjoy some prose for a change.

  3. dave,
    I picked up a new bread book $7.at ollie’s/altoona which features more rye than most. The focus is levain-raised breads (frenchy for sourdough). I’ll share it with you sometime if i ever see you again.

    1. You drove to Altoona and didn’t stop by to see me? Whose fault is that?

      I love sourdough but I’m not sure I want to stretch out the bread-making process that much. It’s tempting, though.

    1. That’s cool. Doesn’t matter to me how a given piece of writing is categorized, actually.

      Thanks for commenting. It’s nice to know you’re still stopping around.

  4. Interesting – I had just found a recipe book on sourdough baking last night in my collection (don’t remember buying it or ever seeing it before) about a young man and a friend who spent a year in the back-country of Canada. It’s about rustic baking – lotsa recipes – some rye. Surprise. Or maybe our instincts know before we do that this will be a rough winter and we’d better get our sourdough going soon?
    hugs from PA (south of ya)
    connie

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