Death By Sourdough: But What a Way to Go

I’m thrilled to announce that we are going to get fat. Namely, because my wife has been making bread.

Not just bread. Bread-bread. The real kind. The illicit kind of bread. The kind of bread that tempts you in vivid daydreams and lurid fantasies. The kind of bread you want to sign a prenuptial agreement with.

Jamie’s bread obsession all began in Spain. The bread in Spain was unusually good. We couldn’t get enough of it. We were always eating bread purchased from bakeries, and it was almost always exceptional. I was not used to bread like this. I grew up eating the supermarket bread that turns into white Play-Doh if you squeeze it real hard.

FACT: Once I made an entire school art project sculpted entirely out of dough made from smashed Wonder Bread, which was then painted to resemble a pirate ship.

But anyway, one day in Spain, in a far-off village on the edge of the earth, some locals told us about an out-of-the-way bakery in town. They said the bread was “auténtico,” and we should not miss it. Then, they’d demonstrate how good the bread was by making shuddering facial expressions as though they were having involuntary pleasure spasms.

Jamie and I eventually found this bakery, after weaving through byways and zigzagging side streets. The bakery was hidden in an alley. The store was about the size of a walk-in closet, and there was no signage. It was basically an old woman’s apartment. The old woman sold 12 varieties of bread. Each type of bread was made that same morning. She let us sample them all.

Our minds were blown.

“Omigod!” exclaimed my wife, verging on inappropriate ecstasy.

“Sí,” said the woman.

“Omigod!” my wife shouted again, causing a slight disturbance in the peace.

“Sí.”

“OmiGOD!” Eyes rolling back into her head. Neck twitching.

So I took her somewhere quiet to lie down.

Later, in a broken Spanish accent, the baker told us that this was the normal American reaction to her bread.

“Americans are deprived,” she said. “I live in Chicago once. You can’t get real bread in the States.”

Then, she went on to tell me why European bread is so superior to American bread. Firstly, because the wheat used in the States is hard red wheat, extremely cheap, commercially grown, and genetically modified in a lab to be insanely high in gluten so it can withstand hours of commercial mixing. Think: cement-truck bread.

“The human body was not meant to eat this mutant wheat,” the baker said.

I looked over at my wife, who was still lying on a cot, having violent convulsions, and uttering religious names.

Moreover, the baker explained, most American breads contain added plastic-grade and silicone conditioners originally developed for the production of shoe rubber and yoga mats. These conditioners make the dough elastic and save manufacturing companies a lot of money. Also, our American bread contains enough preservatives to embalm a giraffe.

As it turns out, most of these American conditioners and chemicals are illegal in Europe. Mostly because they are toxic and dangerous to consume, often leading to a host of medical problems including gluten intolerance, celiac disease, and sudden interest in politics.

The Spanish woman also told us that, to many Europeans, breadmaking is sacred, not to be done in laboratories or factories. Adding chemicals to bread would be like drawing dirty appendages on the Mona Lisa.

Needless to say, after that, all we did in Spain was eat bread. We’d visit some no-name town, then find the bakery and stand waiting in around-the-block lines full of locals who were all jazzed about fresh bread. Everyone in line would be downright giddy, thrumming with excitement. Sort of like Black Friday at Target, minus the fistfights and cop cars.

Amazingly, almost nobody in line was overweight. This, even though all these people do is wolf down entire loaves of bread for every meal.

“That’s because we are eating bread our ancestors ate,” the old woman baker had said. “Our ancestors did not eat yoga mats.”

“Speak for yourself,” I replied.

So, when we arrived back in the States, we looked around for good bread but found none. Even your boutique grocery-store “artisanal” bread with bougie packaging contained conditioners and more preservatives in it than your average funeral-home corpse.

This is when Jamie became obsessed with breadmaking. Within days, there were random scientific books scattered throughout our home. Loose-leaf pages with handwritten equations, ratios, and pH readings. My wife graduated from culinary school and worked for decades as a chef. She takes food very seriously.

Our home became a makeshift bakery. Each flat surface was littered with wooden utensils and huge sacks of artisan flour.

“How’re things coming?” I’d occasionally ask, passing through the kitchen, sorting the mail.

Whereupon Jamie would let loose a maniacal laugh not unlike something from a Mary Shelley novel, and speak in obscure baker’s terminology, saying something like: “Look! Ha! I just degassed the mother!”

Yesterday, she made French bread. Jamie spent the entire afternoon baking. This involved a LOT more steps than most nuclear aeronautical engineering projects.

Periodically, I’d see her spritzing the oven with a spray bottle, or placing steam pans in various locations of the range, setting timers every couple of seconds, checking her mass of dough with probes and temperature gauges.

When the bread emerged from the oven, it looked exactly like the kind of baguettes we had been eating in Europe. And it tasted like them, too. The kind of bread for which people stood in line around the block.

My wife, with flour on her face, a full mouth, and a manic glint in her eyes, said, “We’re gonna get so fat.”

Omigod.