Desert Bread Is Magic!

I’ve always said that I love baking bread because it’s like magic. You add a bunch of ingredients together in a particular order, mixing or folding it in a particular way and at a particular temperature, you let it rise for just the right length of time, then you put it in the oven and…

…you get something amazing, beautiful and delicious to eat.

It’s not like making soup, where if it’s not quite right you can dabble with it, adding this and that, until you have it just right. Bread baking is all about preparation and performance.

But baking bread in the desert has an extra added ingredient, but you have to spend some time in the desert to get it.

The desert is the place where life and death are separated by a hair’s-breadth. It’s a place where you feel the primal pressure of day and night, sun and moon, and your rhythms of sleep and wakefulness quickly fall in line. It’s a place where the night sky seems alive with stars. It’s a place where the quiet can be deafening.

When you first look out across the desert landscape you may see nothing but sand and more sand. But if you are patient, and give it some time for your attention to sharpen and shift, you get your desert eyes (and ears, and nose). And once you get your desert eyes, you realize that the desert – which at first appears completely dead – is teeming with life of all kinds.

A similar thing happens as you get your bakers’ eyes. Bread dough, especially when you are working with wild yeast and a long, slow rise, can seem like a dead lump of flour. But your baker’s senses know otherwise. The subtle signs of life appear like the first desert growth after the rains. It’s almost imperceptible, but there is a subtle lift, a slight change in the smell, a certain quality almost below perception that tells you that your bread is alive.

And with patience and the right conditions that little hint of life bursts forth into a beautiful finished loaf.

To experience the magic of coaxing flour, salt, water, mixed with wild yeast and bacteria into a beautiful loaf of bread, while looking out over the exquisite desert landscape, is to experience the wonder of life as a miracle.