Last week I tried to bake bread for my mother, Russian black bread.
In order to understand this story you must know a few things:
• My mother isn’t much interested in food. She resents the work that goes into preparing something that is gone so quickly.
• She does, however, like certain foods—capers, mushrooms, goat cheese, ginger, and Russian black bread.
You must also know that:
• I love my mother deeply, in ways I cannot put words to.
• At the same time, lately I haven’t wanted to be around her. I haven’t even wanted to talk on the phone. I’m going though some stuff right now, trying to sort things out and I've needed my space. We’ve been sending terse little emails to each other when absolutely necessary, nothing more.
Do these things contradict themselves? Yes, certainly. Are they all true? Absolutely.
What can I say—we’re talking about family here. That road never runs straight.
I love to cook for my mother. I know her palate well enough to know what she’ll like. I make her foods with olives and sun dried tomatoes, lemon and sorrel for tartness, onions caramelized to the point of burnt. I’ve learned to use salt sparingly for her, to leave in the tough outer leaves of greens that might be bitter. She likes strong flavors, this mother of mine; bring on the umami.
When I know she is going to be visiting, I plan what I will cook for her. I get a kick out of feeding the one person who for years fed me—from her own body, even. I’m not sure she notices or values it, but I like to be able to give back to her in this way. One visit last summer, when she had an early morning flight to the East Coast the next day, I stayed up late making quinoa salad for her to take with her. She would have a layover of several hours in New York and I wanted her to have something to eat. I couldn’t imagine what my all-organic, vegetarian, health food mother would find to eat in an airport.
The next morning, on the way to the airport, she turned to me.
“Why did you stay up so late last night cooking?” It had been after midnight when I had gone to bed.
“Because I wanted you to have something good to eat,” I said. And then, without thinking, I blurted out the truth: “Because I love you.”
She sized me up with her eyes. “I thought as much,” she said. “But really, next time, I’d prefer you get the sleep.”
What can I say—we’re always trying to care for the other; perhaps forever at cross-purposes.
But I know my mother loves Russian Black Bread. For a number of years she did volunteer work in Russia, helping to train doctors and nurses. She brought back bread from these trips—small dense loaves of hard bread that she hoarded. She looks for bread like that here, buying loaf after loaf when she finds anything similar. Her favorite these days is a square loaf that is made of only rye flour. If you open her freezer they are stacked in there like bricks. When the apocalypse comes my mother is set for bread, at least for a little while.
When I stumbled upon a recipe for Russian Black Bread in a NPR post written by Deb, mistress of the Smitten Kitchen, I thought my mother might like it. The fact that it required no less that twenty ingredients—among them cider vinegar, molasses, coffee, chocolate, and shallots—meant my curiosity was more than piqued. I thought it might be something good to make as a treat for my mother’s birthday next month. I made out a long shopping list of items: rye flour, wheat bran, caraway seeds, fennel seeds.
I have a bit of a theory, which may be totally off the mark, but I sometimes wonder if our palate is influenced by genetics. My mother’s family is Russian—though several generations back. She didn’t grow up on Russian food, but how to explain a love of caraway seeds, rye, and almost anything pickled? I share many of her preferences. This is why, once I had bought the caraway seeds, I simply had to make the bread. Every time I passed by the shelf where they were sitting, the scent was irresistible. I knew I couldn’t wait until April. My mother was going to be in town that next week, babysitting for my niece, I would have to make the bread then. The caraway seeds were calling me; you can’t fight genetics.
The other small problem in this situation was a potential deal-breaker; you see, I’m terrified of baking with yeast.
This is no irrational fear. It dates back to when I was about thirteen and just getting fascinated with cooking. I decided to make a loaf of challah, the beautiful braided bread served on the Jewish Sabbath. I followed the directions in my reliable Moosewood Cookbook (hippie child that I was). It was a strange recipe, filled with notes about “feeding” the yeast and things rising. I wasn’t sure how “risen” my dough needed to get, but it did seem like the mass in the bowl was getting bigger, maybe.
When my mom and her friend returned home from dinner that evening I proudly presented them with my intricately braided masterpiece, shiny from the eggwash and artfully sprinkled with poppy seeds. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful challah ever. They praised me and I felt proud of my creation.
Then we tried to cut into it.
The loaf was hard as a rock, weighed about ten pounds, and could have made a darned good doorstop. It was, in a word: inedible. I was crushed. At that point I had been cooking steadily for a few years—teaching myself from books as I went along—and I had never had a cooking experience go wrong on me before. Bread was the flavor of my first and only failure.
“What yeast did you use?” my mother asked. When I showed her the container I had found in the fridge she tried not to laugh.
“Oh, sweetie, that’s nutritional yeast—not the kind you use for baking.”
How was I to know there were different kinds of yeast? The book hadn’t mentioned that. I still have a chip on my shoulder about the legacy of the Seventies: the healthfood movement was always getting in the way of my aspirations of being a gourmet.
I tried baking bread one time after that—with the same sad results. Apparently the baking yeast I had used, left over from my mother’s breadmaking days long ago, had died (who knew such a thing was even possible?). Yeast and I did not seem to get along and I took it as a sign. I gave up on the idea of baking bread and have never looked back. I make a mean loaf of Irish Soda Bread, that’s good enough for me.
But this bread, this bread I just had to make was a yeasted bread—did I even dare? I decided to go for it anyway. My long ago Russian ancestors were beaming down on me, I was sure of it. I couldn’t let them down by stopping now.
Yeast, as the bread bakers among you will well know, is a living thing and has to be proofed. This requires dissolving it into warm water—but not too hot or you might kill it—and giving it something to feed on, usually sugar. For someone who is not a baker, this is all very terrifying. I’m not used to running the risk of killing my dinner. Usually by the time it gets into my kitchen it’s pretty well dead already.
But here I was, feeding my yeast and trying to dig up a thermometer to check the temperature of the water (when I did I discovered it was broken). I tested the water on the inside of my wrist instead, hoped for the best, and mixed it all together. Then I held the bowl in my hands, terrified of putting it back down on the cold stone counter top. Could the low temperature also kill the yeast? I tend to keep my house fairly cool, would it be warm enough for the yeast to survive? Perhaps I should just keep on holding the bowl until the proofing process was over.
So I did, for about five minutes. Five very long minutes—there had to be a better solution.
Perhaps a heating pad? I could put the bowl on top of a heating pad set on the lowest temperature—maybe that would be a good idea. But I worried that even the lowest temperature would be too hot and might kill the yeast.
Can you see why I’ve steered clear of yeasted bread? Life is hard enough without the fear of unintentionally murdering your food.
After some deliberation I decided to put the yeast over a heater vent to keep it warm. This required crawling under the dining table every time I wanted to check it, but I was fine with that. I figured the table top would keep the heat circulating and hopefully create a cozy warm corner for the yeast to begin to froth and bubble as it should.
But how did I know if it was frothing correctly? What did that look like? I ran to the computer and did an image search on “proofing yeast.” There was nothing—ack! How was I to know if the beast was really alive? I did not want to risk the sort of crushing failure I had experienced before.
I turned up the heat a bit. The irony that I was heating my house for the benefit of a package of yeast was not lost on me. But I wasn’t going to kill the yeast—please, yeast, don’t die on me now!
While searching for a photo of foamy yeast I came across sites that explain the proofing process. Most of them seem to say you should add one teaspoon of sugar per packet of yeast, one site even recommended a full tablespoon. The sugar is what feeds the yeast and allows it to grow.
But this recipe called for a “pinch” of sugar, that’s what I had put in. I wasn’t at all confident my finger pinch was a teaspoon’s worth. Was I starving the yeast? Would it die from lack of adequate nutrition? I felt like an over-coddling mother, but I sprinkled in a bit of extra sugar just to be sure.
The recipe says the yeast will be foamy in ten minutes, but mine certainly wasn’t. I knew that lower temperatures might require more time (I remember reading somewhere that bread rises slowly if it is on the cooler side) so I was patient. Ten minutes passed, twenty even, and still I refused to give up on my yeast. Come on, yeastie, I know you can make it.
It was nearly forty-five minutes before I felt the tiniest bit of confidence in moving forward. The yeast had thickened a bit, developed a layer that was foam-like if not foaming, and when I retrieved the bowl from under the table (clonking the back of my head in the process) I was delighted to see that bubbles were forming under the surface. Maybe this could work after all.
I may be no expert, but this is an unusual bread recipe. It requires melting butter and chocolate with molasses and vinegar and adding this to a mixture of three different kinds of flour and the yeast. Of course you need to let the melted ingredients cool enough so they don’t kill the yeast (are we sensing a theme here?).
Into this mixture go chopped shallots, espresso powder, fennel seeds and the intoxicating (at least to me) caraway seeds. This is not a bread for the faint of heart.
The dough, which comes together in the mixer (yay, my shiny little Kitchen-Aid), is dense and smells of dark, earthy flavors—the sharp bite of shallots, musky sweet molasses, the woodsy dry scent of caraway. It may be my long ago Russian heritage bubbling up, but it smelled satisfying in a primal sort of way. This sort of bread will fill you up like no white fluffy loaf ever could. This is the bread you have always wanted to eat.
I may be a novice bread baker, but I love to knead bread. This too feels primal and instinctive: gathering the dough towards me and pushing it away; left foot forward, my right foot braced to the rear; my entire body part of the motion. No one ever needed to tell me how to knead bread, it’s in my genes, in my hands, in my history. This is the time-honored work of women.
The only time I appreciate those ugly stone counters is when I'm kneading something.
Then, of course, there is a second rising to worry about. The dough needs to go back in the bowl, covered, and again set somewhere warm (back under the dining table for me—watch not to clonk the head). In the second rise the dough is apparently supposed to double—double! That always feels inconceivable.
My dough did expand—though again it took some time (is my house really that cold? Is that why I’ve been bundled up in fleece all winter long?). I’m not sure it doubled, but it got sufficiently large enough that I felt okay to proceed. The recipe suggests this will take an hour and a half to two hours. For me it took nearly four hours before I felt I could move forward. That’s okay, I was beginning to learn patience.
Can you tell from the photo that it is now nighttime? I had become very patient.
I shaped the loaves, let them rise again—and this is when I discovered something miraculous. This stove here in the Treehouse, the one I complain about on a weekly basis because it is a stupid, glass-top electric stove that might be someone’s idea of cool lookin but is actually awful to cook on. Well, this stove has a “bread proofing” setting on it—hallelujah! I slid the bread into the oven, turned it to the correct setting for bread proofing, and whistled a happy tune.
Then, when it had proved itself yet again by gently swelling, I baked the loaves for nearly an hour. The smell that began to come out of the oven was intoxicating—sweet, yeasty, savory. It smelled like the best bread ever.
My mother didn’t arrive until almost eleven o’clock that night. The bread had taken me until ten—a near eleven-hour process (about double what it should take someone, but chalk it up to my inexperience and a very cold house). I’d like to tell you that I was able to wait one measly hour before tasting it, but I couldn’t. I sliced into hot bread that was dense but not heavy, studded with caraway seeds in a fragrant, slightly moist crumb and I nearly wept—it was that good. More than worth the effort.
I still don’t know about that theory of genetic palates—perhaps it is why I find this Russian Black Bread to be just about the best thing I have ever tasted. Perhaps this is why my mother and I managed to nibble through an entire loaf in under forty-eight hours. I wrapped up the second loaf and gave it to her to take back to California, but after she had left I was sorry we hadn’t split it instead. I have been craving this bread ever since, a primal sort of craving. Genetics or no, this is powerful stuff.
I made the bread again this past weekend—I had to or I was going to scratch my eyeballs out from sheer longing. This time I found the warmest corner of the house and proofed my yeast there (over a heater vent, in a corner behind the couch). I now have no problem cranking up the heat in service of my yeast. I was a paranoid mother character again and added two teaspoons of sugar, just to be on the safe side. It frothed up quite nicely, peaks and all, in fact. I think I’ve got the hang of this darned yeast thing. At last, victory is mine.
As for the bread itself, as Deb writes in the header notes to the recipe: “I am struggling to say anything objective about this bread, because it is, hands down, the best I have ever baked and possibly ever eaten; in a few weeks, we've made it halfway through our second batch.”
About my mom and me? We’re getting along better, thank you very much. I can’t say it was entirely the baking that did it, but who knows. Perhaps we just needed to break the bread of our ancestors together, to bond over caraway and rye.
Deb's Russian Black Bread recipe: Chorni Chleb
Undertake this recipe at your own risk and peril. I have now become entirely addicted to this bread. The second batch I made I added extra caraway seeds (another tsp) and more shallots (an extra tsp of those too), which I chopped a bit coarser to suit my preferences, I also sprinkled caraway seeds on top (because, in my world, you can't have too many). It was so good that the next day I bagged all but a small piece of it up and gave it away to friends—because I cannot be trusted in the same house with the stuff, I fear what might happen.
It's a crazy recipe—vinegar, molasses, chocolate—but that just makes it crazy good. Proceed with caution; you have been warned.
is out next month. It's definitely on my new reading list.
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