Last August I started a project, a tribute to my mother really. No meal was complete to mom unless it included bread. After reading William Alexander’s 52 Loaves I set out to bake some sort of bread each week from her birthday in 2014 until it arrived again in 2015. I baked lots in the past year, but not fifty-two loaves. Bread baking from scratch is a lot of work and time consuming. A bread recipe can’t be started on a whim. Plus, we found some favorites that were repeated several times rather than trying something new each week.
It didn’t take long before the pantry was lined in a parade of flours–whole grains, bleached, unbleached, bread, all purpose–not to mention a variety of brands. Some recipes had me weigh ingredients, others measured by the cup.
I made hearty breads, quick breads, and sweet breads. I found the recipe for these rolls at Baby Boy Bakery. The cinnamon rolls aren’t iced yet, and you can’t see that the bottoms are bathed in gooey brown sugar and pecans. They were amazing, but fifty-two consecutive weeks of these babies would be too much of a good thing in terms of our health!
I was well into my year of baking before I took a good look at where my flour was coming from. I have tried to be conscious about eating locally whenever possible. I am embarrassed to admit that here I sat in the Wheat State, the Bread Basket of America, mixing up recipe after recipe of yummy goodness using flour milled by Gold Medal in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What is worse, lots of that wheat was likely grown in Kansas, trucked to a Minnesota mill, and trucked back to Kansas as flour. It is great flour to be sure, but so is Hudson Cream Flour from Stafford County, Kansas and it wins on the local front hands down.
Mural in North Topeka
I didn’t make it to my original goal of fifty-two loaves in a year, but I wouldn’t call my project a failure either. It is hard to call a year of satisfying breads and rolls a failure. The timeframe wasn’t realistic for me, but that won’t stop me kneading and baking all sorts of breads whenever the mood strikes. I have decided over the course of the year that my mom was onto something. You may not be able to live by bread alone, but what a way to go!
