It has Risen

Alright. I just took the pure levain breads out of the oven and they're beyond gorgeous. The recipe, of course, came from Flour Salt Water Yeast by Ken Forkish; Overnight Country Blonde. Not a drop of yeast and only 2 months of working at it, but I finally have perfected this bread.

What it really took was a familiarity and a trust.  Many bread makers talk about stickiness and tackiness. In Hawaii, where the humidity is so high and it is so warm, I really found that the recipes were too wet and the breads would fall. Once I understood this, and relied more on the feeling in my hands and getting a texture that I knew, the bread began to turn out wonderfully.

I would like to experiment more with the tangy taste that is common to levains. Perhaps I'll do that soon. Right now, I'm looking for the next bread book. Any suggestions?

What happened to the bread?

You must be wondering if I got lost in the loaf, burned in the oven or just flattened out right? Well, all of those things are true. You see, I decided to go through the whole book-Flour Water Salt Yeast. And at the levain section something went terribly wrong and I didn't want to tell you. My loaves were bricks of nothing. Nothing. They were so hard, I couldn't even cut through them. What had happened?

At night, I would review. I had tried to hard to follow Ken's Forkish's very precise directions and do it exactly as he said. But what had happened? This is what came to me.

Baking bread is a primal art. It's been practiced since time began (almost) and I believe the art of bread making connects us to each other, to the earth  and yes, to God. I've been baking bread since I was in my early 20's. I've sold my own bread.  To feed my children. That's right, bread helped us to survive through the hard times. So, what was happening with THIS bread?

I was disconnected from myself. There is a certain touch to bread that you only know about through practice and experience. I don't know exactly how to describe it other than it's when the ingredients have combined perfectly and are in union. The bread quits sticking to your hands and begins to develop it's own identity. That feeling is embedded in my soul. And, because I was trying so hard to do it like Ken, I got lost from my own identity.

I decided to come back to myself and to believe in myself again. I began to knead the bread as I always had and to wait for that magic moment when the dough was just right. Since that decision, my bread has come out beautiful each time. And the reason is because I'm coming from my center, from my heart and from my strength.

I'm now ready to move further into the levain process. Right now, people are asking for my bread and I'm so pleased. And we are enjoying it again, which is why I started the whole process in the first place.