"anaerobic" kneading

Yesterday's batch of bread—made from Charles's very versatile* recipe—turned out perfectly. I used parchment paper this time, and the bread detached itself from the paper with nary a complaint. Because I'm making garlic bread for the troops this Friday, I made six large rolls that I tried to shape a bit like mini-baguettes, but they all ended up hilariously malformed: a testament to my continued lack of dough-handling finesse. I've now baked two "official" batches of bread, but that's not enough to say I have the hang of how to do it. For the moment, I'm a literalist with no baking-related intuitions of my own, desperately clinging to other people's instructions (luckily, Charles's instructions are clear and well written, with the stages of prep very clearly demarcated). It's going to be like this until I've baked a variety of breads and have begun to feel a bit more comfortable with the routine and ritual of baking. Luckily, baking is a mindfulness-promoting activity, so I enjoy doing it, even if the kneading portion of the work is a bit of a pain.

And speaking of kneading: it was when I was about three or four minutes into kneading last night's batch of bread that I had an epiphany: how about avoiding the whole sticky-dough issue by slamming the wad of dough into a giant Ziploc bag? I could save time and effort on cleanup for both my table surface and my fingers,** all while still kneading the hell out of the dough without having to scrape my digits down every two minutes. I don't know about you, but I thought this was fucking brilliant, so I stopped my cell phone's countdown timer, gathered up the dough with a bench scraper, pulled out a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, and tipped the dough into it. The dough occupied about nine-tenths of the bag's interior; little air pockets resided in the corners. No matter; I started kneading, and it was great. Why hadn't I thought of this before? I wondered. Probably because my fifty-year-old brain is slowing down.

I reset the timer with some extra minutes to make up for the time I'd needed to stop, grab a Ziploc, gather up my dough, and stuff it into the bag. In the end, I must have kneaded the dough for close to twenty minutes. I got out a sharp knife and, using a combination of leverage, gravity, and the precise application of the blade, I deftly split the Ziploc open and peeled away the top layer of plastic to reveal a well-kneaded, well-behaved blob of white, yeasty goodness that smelled amazing. Like last time, I tipped the dough into a plastic container to allow it to rise for an hour. At this point, Charles's instructions reassured me that "the hard work is done."

Ultimately, I shaped the dough into hoagie-ish buns, painted them with milk, and baked them at the requisite temperature. The smell of baking bread was eminently calming; serenity spread throughout my apartment. In order to brown the tops of the buns, I had to flip on my topside heating elements in my oven; luckily, my oven has a setting that allows both bottom and top burners to be on at once, each at a somewhat lower temperature so that the ambient temp inside the oven remains the same. This setting allows for direct heat to radiate down onto whatever is baking, but without burning it the way a full-on broiler might (the oven does have a top-burner-only setting for when a broiler is needed). I let everything bake to completion; the oven's bell dinged, and I left the bread inside the oven to cool so as to minimize moisture loss. That was last night; this morning, I opened the oven up to retrieve the bread, and I saw everything was perfect (everything but the weird shape of the slightly malformed buns, I mean). I bagged five of the six buns up and stuck them in the freezer, where they'll remain until Thursday night. The runtiest of the buns became my lunch; it went great with butter. I'm impatient to see how all the buns fare when slathered with garlic butter.*** We'll know in a couple days. Meanwhile, I can add "anaerobic" kneading to my Ziploc bag of tricks. It works! And it really does minimize cleanup.

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*The dough, in burger-bun form, has already worked for hamburgers and other sandwiches. With today's batch, one bread came out looking exactly like a hot-dog bun, so I'm pretty sure I can go in that direction. This Friday, I'll be using this batch as a kind of homemade garlic bread, even though the bread is by no means "Italian" bread. (Which reminds me: I wonder how much actual Italian bread I've really eaten. The American-style "Italian" bread is probably about as Italian as Confucius is. It looks and feels like a limp attempt at something French, but with a barely-there crust that seems halfhearted at best. The Spruce Eats has a recipe that it claims to be "traditional" Italian bread. See here.

**The first time I kneaded bread dough, I got a lot stuck on my fingers, but as the knead progressed, the dough stuck less and less to the tabletop as it firmed up and gained coherence. It still stuck a lot to my fingers, though. Charles submits that that problem may be a matter of refining my kneading technique.

***Because the bread comes out so moist, I have a feeling it'd be awesome for grilling. Alas, I don't live in a building that allows true grilling, so I'll have to make do with my grill pan.