No-knead Bread, No Thanks, Not for Me

I have been thinking about bread a lot lately. Last week I baked a loaf of no-knead wheat bread. Have you heard of this fad sweeping through the kitchens of America? Mark Bittman introduced many people to it through the Minimalist column in the NYT, then food pages at local papers picked it up and spread the word. I resisted, since I had time to knead bread, and liked the results I was getting. I also resisted on account of my natural aversion to popular trends - if everyone is raving about something, no matter what it is, I decide that I probably won't like it, and therefore abstain. At least until it is no longer quite so poplular. (I refused to read the Harry Potter books when I first heard about them, but when I did get around to it, it was because I was in Scotland, and I read the first two in a day. I have yet to try the Twilight series, and now that it is a movie, I probably never will.)

Anyway, I tried this loaf of bread last week, and well, meh. It was a decent loaf of bread, but it wasn't anything special. My theory is that the people who were raving about it were people who hadn't eaten a decent handmade loaf of bread in a long time, and were therefore astounded at the taste. Compared to the dry, fluffy, chemical-laced product sold in grocery stores as "bread," no-knead bread is spectacular. Compared, however, to bread that you have spent your time waiting for, working on, feeling beneath your palms as you knead it and shape it, no-knead bread is missing something. Something vital. The sense of accomplishment, for one thing. If you don't have to work at it, then the bread doesn't have that. It is a similar situation to tomatoes or carrots. If you buy carrots at the store in a bag, and that is all you ever know, or the pasty tomatoes in the produce section, then you probably think people who say they love these vegetables (yes, tomatoes are fruit, but for the sake of brevity they are vegetables) are nuts. If you then eat a tomato or carrot from a farmer's market, you begin to get an idea of what they are going on about. These vegetables have a flavor, a scent, something that elevates them from the store-bought (yeah, they weren't grown thousands of miles away and harvested weeks ago...). And that is good. More people should know that joy.

But those farmer's market vegetables, good as they are, cannot compare to the carrot or tomato or even zucchini that you grow in your own garden. That you water with your own hands, weed, stake, tend, wait impatiently for throughout the season, then harvest and eat within 1 minute. Then, then you know what a true Platonic ideal of a vegetable tastes like, what carrotness really is. Many children who do not like vegetables in general will eat vegetables they have raised, because they had a hand in it, they have pride of ownership. I can still remember the excitement and joy I felt when I would help my father harvest carrots, peapods, and tomatoes from his garden, and again when I would get to eat them.

It is the same with bread. If no-knead bread gets more people baking and realizing the joy of homemade bread, and gets them to reject the so-called bread at the store, then I am all for it. I love my farmer's markets, and I love buying from other people who have spent their time looking out for the vegetables or chickens or what-have-you that I am buying, because let's face it, I can't grow much of anything in an apartment (yes, I have done some container gardening, but it isn't very productive). And I love going to bakeries where the bread is made with the same type of care. But if I am going to bake bread for myself, as long as I have the time and the will to spend in the baking of bread, I prefer to knead my own. To spend effort and love in making something that will feed me, my husband, and my friends.