Cool? Cool!

August 26, mid-afternoon temperature: 63℉! August 26, mid-afternoon temperature: 63℉? We are definitely back into bread-baking season. Today we'll bake a couple of loaves of 5 minutes a day artisan bread. Tomorrow, probably, a couple of loaves of sourdough will go into the oven.

artisan bread and cloche

Photo by J. Harrington

We've been informed the bread is needed to go with tomorrow's fish chowder dinner, which was triggered by unseasonably cool temperatures. (No, fish chowder triggering bread baking is NOT similar to shooting fish in a barrel, but it does involve loaves and fishes.) It's been so long since we baked any Artisan bread, it's almost like we'd never done it. After eating sourdough, Artisan bread's milder flavor seems lacking somehow, but then, even our normal sourdough could be more sour to suit our taste, but we keep getting out-voted.

sourdough bread loaves

Photo by J. Harrington

For several years now, we've had a subscription to a magazine named taproot. The current issue's article on baking notes that "Baking can be a practice in mindfulness, an inquiry into the self,  a medium for expression, or a quiet therapy with no specific purpose." It is truly awesome what can be accomplished by mixing flour, water, salt, sourdough and/or yeast and some heat and love. The results vary, naturally, with the quantity and quality of each ingredient, especially the love, although cool weather adds extra appreciation for an oven's warmth as well as a warm heart.

Of Minnesota's four seasons, our preferences place Winter last, Summer third, Spring second and Autumn first, but on a points awarded system, such placings wouldn't always be consistent. Autumn brings harvest, fresh crops of new apples, pumpkins, Halloween (candy and ghost stories) and Thanksgiving. Spring has ephemeral wildflowers, Easter (candy and chicks), snowmelt and new leaves. Winter's first snow is often a treat and Christmas is always a good time. Summer is CSA shares, goose goslings and crane colts and warm, lazy days on a beach or river bank, if we're lucky. Then again, there's something almost magical about fly fishing in a Winter snowstorm and we've yet to see a dragonfly in Winter. We're glad we've got four seasons and don't have to choose just one, even if, on days like today, it can be a challenge to figure out which season we're enjoying.

Waifs and Strays

Arthur Rimbaud, 1854 - 1891

Black in the fog and in the snow,
Where the great air-hole windows glow,
With rounded rumps,

Upon their knees five urchins squat,
Looking down where the baker, hot,
The thick dough thumps.

They watch his white arm turn the bread,
Ere through an opening flaming red
The loaf he flings.

They hear the good bread baking, while
The chubby baker with a smile
An old tune sings.

Breathing the warmth into their soul,
They squat around the red air-hole,
As a breast warm.

And when, for feasters’ midnight bout,
The ready bread is taken out,
In a cake’s form;

And while beneath the blackened beams,
Sings every crust of golden gleams,
While the cricket brags,

The hole breathes warmth into the night,
And into them life and delight,
Under their rags,

And the urchins covered with hoar-frost,
On billows of enchantment tossed
Their little souls,

Glue to the grate their little rosy
Noses, singing through the cosy
Glowing holes,

But with low voices like a prayer,
Bending down to the light down there,
Where heaven gleams.

—So eager that they burst their breeches,
And in the winter wind that screeches
Their linen streams.

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