Vinterbrødre (Hlynur Palmason, 2017)
"How did you do that?"
"I don't know."
Of all the food stuffs I've learned to make over the years the one which is by far the most satisfying and mystical is bread. It involves combining ingredients which are not necessarily food per se, but through specific mixing, treatment, and the use of heat you create one of the simplest and most nuanced types of food there is. I started off with simple loaves: flour, yeast, salt and sugar. Using a tin I created simple 'famers' loaves. First with wholewheat flour, and then with white. The scent of warm bread filling the house was something I quickly became addicted to, and making these loaves became a daily occurrence. Then I got bored and started to make combinations of wholewheat and white flour to see what would happen. Eventually it got to a stage where I didn't need to follow a recipe anymore, I could just make these farmers loaves by eye. And it was enjoyable, satisfying, but I wanted to branch out and create different types of bread. So I did.
I moved into a wide variety of bread: baguettes, rye, focaccia, pita, ciabatta, challah, pumpernickel, carababa, lenten, walnut, chapati, fougasse. You name it, I made it. There was something magical about this period of my life. I would often visit people with a wreath of bread - three different types of dough plaited together into a large circular wreath. Truth be told, it's quite simple to do. But if you don't know bread (and let's be honest, pretty much no one knows bread anymore) then you would be bowled over by the wreath. But by far my favourite type of bread to make (with the critically lesser-known fougasse drawing a close second) was sourdough.
There are different ways to make sourdough, but the one that was most special was the three day sourdough. It has three ingredients: flour, salt, water. On the first day you mix a pound of flour with a cup of water and leave it for 24 hours. The next day you'd add another cup of water with another pound of flour and add a tablespoon of salt. This time you'd mix it thoroughly, knead it a little, and then leave it to one side for another 24 hours. On the third day you add another cup of water with another pound of flour to the mix (perhaps a little late, but it's worth mentioning that these 'pounds of flour' can be different amounts of different types - for example, one quarter white, three quarters wholewheat, or whatever) mix and knead and leave everything for twenty hours. At the end of this time, you divide the dough into two or three loaves, and let them prove for four more hours. Then it's into the oven.
The bread that this produces is unlike the kind of sourdough that you may have eaten. It's extremely flavoursome - malty. If you're British then 'shreddies' is a good reference point - but of course, it depends on how you blended different types of flour, if you blended different types at all. Traditionally, you're supposed to keep a small piece of the dough aside as a 'starter' to help inculcate the natural creation of yeasts in the air, but I never did. I always started from scratch.
When my youngest child was born I was in the final stages of a three day sourdough. Because the thing takes so long and is so time dependent, I was lucky that she was born at home. At around 6pm I put my eldest to bed, read her a few stories, and about 40 minutes after I'd said good night there was a new person in the house. The visiting midwife left and there were four of us. What a trip. At this point I spent a while staring at someone who didn't know who I was or what was going on. Then I got back to the bread. I made two loaves, which is more than I would be able to eat before it started to stale, so I needed someone to take one of these loaves. Fortunately, we were visited that night by a friend who was a buyer for Waitrose, a supermarket in the UK which specialises in more artisanal food types. I thought she and her husband would make a wonderful foster family for my second three day sourdough loaf, so when she left I gave her the second loaf, still warm, and wrapped in muslin.
A few days later we found ourselves at the home of the couple who took the second loaf, and there it was - sitting on the counter top, untouched. My work had gone unappreciated, and the loaf would soon end its lifecycle in the dustbin.
What I'm saying here is not that the taking of food stuffs from others writes you into a contract whereby you have to eat them. What Im saying is that I misjudged the couple. I thought they would be as interested in bread as I was. But I was wrong.
Few people are as interested in bread as I am. And that's okay.
Years later, when my children were teenagers, we went to a cabin in the woods in Drammen, Norway. The cabin had no running water or electricity, and the oven was a wood burning stove. It had been many years since I had been deep in my bread obsession, but I thought that this might be a nice environment to start making bread again, or at the very least to renew our acquaintance. There were no bread tins, and to get the wood you had to chop logs with an axe. The water that I used came from a nearby well or river. As luck would have it there happened to be some yeast at the cabin. Flour we had in abundance. Norwegian people really love baking and making waffles, and the cupboards in the cabin contained many tins of flour. The first loaf I made was somewhat lacking, but a lot of the success of breadmaking involves familiarity with the environment. You need to know the oven, how hot it gets, where the hotspots are. And different seasons and environments will require different rising and proofing times. It's a learning game. One in which you have to pay attention to each step, how things are going, and then review at the end by eating the bread and deciding whether you need more or less water, more or less kneading, more or less rising time, etc, etc, etc. The second loaf was much better, and the third even better than that, and so on and so forth. My children may have been lying, but they said that they liked each and every loaf. This may have been something to do with life in the cabin.
Food is scarce. You only have what you brought with you, and every time you cook you reduce the amount of food you have. But bread is the opposite. You take items which aren't exactly food to begin with, and after some time you find yourself with more food than you had a few hours ago. When you're cold and hungry this is the greatest possible magic trick. And they fell upon every loaf I made, barely letting it cool before it was eaten with butter, jam, geitost, whatever was to hand.
One day I woke up early, before anyone else, and made dough as quietly as I could. Set it to rise, and then got a map of the local area. I'd found a lake the previous day that I wanted to take everyone to, but I was unsure of the route. I studied the map until I felt I'd memorised the way, and then set out with a compass. At one point I had to leave one path and join another and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find this point again so I collected stones and made the shape of a circle at the point where the two paths crossed. I carried on, but quickly realised that this was indeed the path to the lake. However, this trip had already been tough on my children: they were only teenagers, and walks like this thrilled them slightly less than they did me, so I decided to keep going, to absolutely make sure that this was the path to the lake. I didn't like the idea of them getting tired and me not being completely positive that we were going the right way, so I continued. It took me around an hour to get to the lake, but the satisfaction of finding it was something difficult to explain. I wasn't tired, I was invigorated. I sat down by the side of the lack and smoked a cigarette. Two ducks swam over to me and lacking anything to feed them I picked blueberries from a bush next to the lake and threw these to the ducks. They ate them greedily. I smoked another cigarette and then walked into the lake, filled my hands with water and soaked my hair. The walk back would be long and hard, and by the time I got back to the cabin my clothes and hair would have dried.
The return journey seemed to go much faster, and my heart sang when I saw that circle of stones marking the path back to the cabin. Without it I definitely would have missed the turning and who knows how long I could have been wandering the forest for. Everything looks the same in the forest. You get lost remarkably quickly.
When I got back everyone was still asleep. I knocked the loaf back and left it to prove for an hour. I chopped logs into small pieces and started the fire burning in the stove, it needed a good hour or so of burning before the oven would be hot enough. Then I ground coffee beans in a hand grinder, and made coffee. The sound of the grinder woke my eldest and my partner so I made risengrØt for everyone. We had little milk left, which meant that the luxury of eating warm risengrØt with melting butter was something like eating swan, or foie gras. When we'd finished I put the loaves in the oven and woke my youngest - the child who was born right at the end of the three day sourdough process all those years ago. Later that day we all swam in the lake and ate sandwiches with bread that had not existed that morning.
When I tell people about my time in the cabin (I've been twice now) they often balk at the difficulty of it all. And yes, it is difficult. Everything takes time. There can be no mistakes. You have to watch the amount of food and water you have carefully. You can only make heat or cook by burning wood. Chop wood, carry wood, burn wood. You smell of wood smoke all the time. You have to walk everywhere, and the way is never easy. But that's why I go. If the paths were paved, if the food were made in a microwave and came out of sealed plastic packages then the entire experience would lose its majesty. Sometimes I wonder what my children will think of these two visits to the cabin when they are older. And not just because of the experience itself, but because of the experience of being there with me: their stern and sullen, but equally friendly and talkative father. It's easy to say that sometimes we feel like two different people, but it's not quite correct for me. Sometimes I feel like a myriad of different people, able to do different things in different circumstances. Some of those circumstances bring out the best in me, and most noticeably when everything is as difficult as it can possibly be I find that I am at my absolute best. The easier things get, the less easy I am. And that's okay.
"I don't know."
Of all the food stuffs I've learned to make over the years the one which is by far the most satisfying and mystical is bread. It involves combining ingredients which are not necessarily food per se, but through specific mixing, treatment, and the use of heat you create one of the simplest and most nuanced types of food there is. I started off with simple loaves: flour, yeast, salt and sugar. Using a tin I created simple 'famers' loaves. First with wholewheat flour, and then with white. The scent of warm bread filling the house was something I quickly became addicted to, and making these loaves became a daily occurrence. Then I got bored and started to make combinations of wholewheat and white flour to see what would happen. Eventually it got to a stage where I didn't need to follow a recipe anymore, I could just make these farmers loaves by eye. And it was enjoyable, satisfying, but I wanted to branch out and create different types of bread. So I did.
I moved into a wide variety of bread: baguettes, rye, focaccia, pita, ciabatta, challah, pumpernickel, carababa, lenten, walnut, chapati, fougasse. You name it, I made it. There was something magical about this period of my life. I would often visit people with a wreath of bread - three different types of dough plaited together into a large circular wreath. Truth be told, it's quite simple to do. But if you don't know bread (and let's be honest, pretty much no one knows bread anymore) then you would be bowled over by the wreath. But by far my favourite type of bread to make (with the critically lesser-known fougasse drawing a close second) was sourdough.
There are different ways to make sourdough, but the one that was most special was the three day sourdough. It has three ingredients: flour, salt, water. On the first day you mix a pound of flour with a cup of water and leave it for 24 hours. The next day you'd add another cup of water with another pound of flour and add a tablespoon of salt. This time you'd mix it thoroughly, knead it a little, and then leave it to one side for another 24 hours. On the third day you add another cup of water with another pound of flour to the mix (perhaps a little late, but it's worth mentioning that these 'pounds of flour' can be different amounts of different types - for example, one quarter white, three quarters wholewheat, or whatever) mix and knead and leave everything for twenty hours. At the end of this time, you divide the dough into two or three loaves, and let them prove for four more hours. Then it's into the oven.
The bread that this produces is unlike the kind of sourdough that you may have eaten. It's extremely flavoursome - malty. If you're British then 'shreddies' is a good reference point - but of course, it depends on how you blended different types of flour, if you blended different types at all. Traditionally, you're supposed to keep a small piece of the dough aside as a 'starter' to help inculcate the natural creation of yeasts in the air, but I never did. I always started from scratch.
When my youngest child was born I was in the final stages of a three day sourdough. Because the thing takes so long and is so time dependent, I was lucky that she was born at home. At around 6pm I put my eldest to bed, read her a few stories, and about 40 minutes after I'd said good night there was a new person in the house. The visiting midwife left and there were four of us. What a trip. At this point I spent a while staring at someone who didn't know who I was or what was going on. Then I got back to the bread. I made two loaves, which is more than I would be able to eat before it started to stale, so I needed someone to take one of these loaves. Fortunately, we were visited that night by a friend who was a buyer for Waitrose, a supermarket in the UK which specialises in more artisanal food types. I thought she and her husband would make a wonderful foster family for my second three day sourdough loaf, so when she left I gave her the second loaf, still warm, and wrapped in muslin.
A few days later we found ourselves at the home of the couple who took the second loaf, and there it was - sitting on the counter top, untouched. My work had gone unappreciated, and the loaf would soon end its lifecycle in the dustbin.
What I'm saying here is not that the taking of food stuffs from others writes you into a contract whereby you have to eat them. What Im saying is that I misjudged the couple. I thought they would be as interested in bread as I was. But I was wrong.
Few people are as interested in bread as I am. And that's okay.
Years later, when my children were teenagers, we went to a cabin in the woods in Drammen, Norway. The cabin had no running water or electricity, and the oven was a wood burning stove. It had been many years since I had been deep in my bread obsession, but I thought that this might be a nice environment to start making bread again, or at the very least to renew our acquaintance. There were no bread tins, and to get the wood you had to chop logs with an axe. The water that I used came from a nearby well or river. As luck would have it there happened to be some yeast at the cabin. Flour we had in abundance. Norwegian people really love baking and making waffles, and the cupboards in the cabin contained many tins of flour. The first loaf I made was somewhat lacking, but a lot of the success of breadmaking involves familiarity with the environment. You need to know the oven, how hot it gets, where the hotspots are. And different seasons and environments will require different rising and proofing times. It's a learning game. One in which you have to pay attention to each step, how things are going, and then review at the end by eating the bread and deciding whether you need more or less water, more or less kneading, more or less rising time, etc, etc, etc. The second loaf was much better, and the third even better than that, and so on and so forth. My children may have been lying, but they said that they liked each and every loaf. This may have been something to do with life in the cabin.
Food is scarce. You only have what you brought with you, and every time you cook you reduce the amount of food you have. But bread is the opposite. You take items which aren't exactly food to begin with, and after some time you find yourself with more food than you had a few hours ago. When you're cold and hungry this is the greatest possible magic trick. And they fell upon every loaf I made, barely letting it cool before it was eaten with butter, jam, geitost, whatever was to hand.
One day I woke up early, before anyone else, and made dough as quietly as I could. Set it to rise, and then got a map of the local area. I'd found a lake the previous day that I wanted to take everyone to, but I was unsure of the route. I studied the map until I felt I'd memorised the way, and then set out with a compass. At one point I had to leave one path and join another and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find this point again so I collected stones and made the shape of a circle at the point where the two paths crossed. I carried on, but quickly realised that this was indeed the path to the lake. However, this trip had already been tough on my children: they were only teenagers, and walks like this thrilled them slightly less than they did me, so I decided to keep going, to absolutely make sure that this was the path to the lake. I didn't like the idea of them getting tired and me not being completely positive that we were going the right way, so I continued. It took me around an hour to get to the lake, but the satisfaction of finding it was something difficult to explain. I wasn't tired, I was invigorated. I sat down by the side of the lack and smoked a cigarette. Two ducks swam over to me and lacking anything to feed them I picked blueberries from a bush next to the lake and threw these to the ducks. They ate them greedily. I smoked another cigarette and then walked into the lake, filled my hands with water and soaked my hair. The walk back would be long and hard, and by the time I got back to the cabin my clothes and hair would have dried.
The return journey seemed to go much faster, and my heart sang when I saw that circle of stones marking the path back to the cabin. Without it I definitely would have missed the turning and who knows how long I could have been wandering the forest for. Everything looks the same in the forest. You get lost remarkably quickly.
When I got back everyone was still asleep. I knocked the loaf back and left it to prove for an hour. I chopped logs into small pieces and started the fire burning in the stove, it needed a good hour or so of burning before the oven would be hot enough. Then I ground coffee beans in a hand grinder, and made coffee. The sound of the grinder woke my eldest and my partner so I made risengrØt for everyone. We had little milk left, which meant that the luxury of eating warm risengrØt with melting butter was something like eating swan, or foie gras. When we'd finished I put the loaves in the oven and woke my youngest - the child who was born right at the end of the three day sourdough process all those years ago. Later that day we all swam in the lake and ate sandwiches with bread that had not existed that morning.
When I tell people about my time in the cabin (I've been twice now) they often balk at the difficulty of it all. And yes, it is difficult. Everything takes time. There can be no mistakes. You have to watch the amount of food and water you have carefully. You can only make heat or cook by burning wood. Chop wood, carry wood, burn wood. You smell of wood smoke all the time. You have to walk everywhere, and the way is never easy. But that's why I go. If the paths were paved, if the food were made in a microwave and came out of sealed plastic packages then the entire experience would lose its majesty. Sometimes I wonder what my children will think of these two visits to the cabin when they are older. And not just because of the experience itself, but because of the experience of being there with me: their stern and sullen, but equally friendly and talkative father. It's easy to say that sometimes we feel like two different people, but it's not quite correct for me. Sometimes I feel like a myriad of different people, able to do different things in different circumstances. Some of those circumstances bring out the best in me, and most noticeably when everything is as difficult as it can possibly be I find that I am at my absolute best. The easier things get, the less easy I am. And that's okay.