Bread
was once nourishing. Jesus was a fan, Thoreau too. Sandwiches were invented and
families were brought up on the stuff. During the war, flour was bulked out with
sawdust. Then we got Wonder Bread, which, for anyone not familiar with the
concept of artificial bread, is artificial bread. It doesn’t mould. It doesn’t
live, practically sawdust. Bread is chemically leavened, chemically preserved,
“more the product of the embalmer’s art than the baker’s”. All of a sudden
gluten was bad for us and everyone knew that it was especially bad for them,
personally. You can find recipes for making pancakes… with cauliflower…
Dieticians tell us to eat fat and protein. Others, only to eat things that are
green. They tell us to go back to the forager’s diet, to a beginning full of
nuts and seeds. They tell us to look over a major step in our evolution; that
it’s no big deal that finally, with things like the bread made from our first
experiments in farming grains 10,000 years ago, we had a constant source of
calories, something we could store throughout the winter. No big deal that with
bread, we evolved from hoping we’d find a deer to kill to masters of our own
dinners.
Then
I found the breads made by restaurant As. Great bread, alive, organic, hearty,
chewy. Something you can keep using for a month. Add a bit of water, put it in
the oven and it’s back to fluffy. Back to crusty. And the baguettes of Le
Fournil deserve poems but for the fact they'll be old by lunch time.
But
these breads are exceptions. Much of the rest you find in Amsterdam will go
un-reversibly stale within days. It’ll likely only be ¾ baked too, and
flavourless. What to do with all those lemons in life? Make lemonade.
Two recipes for your leftover bread and a special mention.
