Bread of life, or life with bread?

Other folks isolating from the pandemic have embraced home improvement, de-cluttering their lives, and baking with unbridled enthusiasm.

Our efforts at home improvement began and ended with a couple new toilet seats.

In May, friends posted photos of recently purged and organized closets. Although the jeans in my own closet seem to have shrunk one size, I’m keeping them. Call me sentimental.

By August, the closet-cleaning friends boasted they’d digitized 40 years of family photos. I delegated that task to my daughter, who has two kids and works full time. Call me lazy.

Instead, I plunged into sourdough bread making.

I have a long — albeit sporadic — history with bread making. Early on, while balancing a legal career with mothering and housekeeping, I reckoned baking bread for the family would burnish my image. Call me competitive.

So while three days a week I traded sweats and running shoes for suit and high heels, the other two, I donned apron and made bread with my daughter, Kate.

Bread making is a time-consuming process, and to get the job done, we had to be home throughout. When loaves went into the oven, Kate went down for naps. When she woke, we’d have tea parties with fresh bread and butter and raspberry jam.

Then my friend Maureen suggested taking our kids to free swimming Friday mornings. This threw me into a quandary. Swimming was important, but Friday was bread day. Fortunately, what began as an either/or dilemma turned into a both/and workaround.

Before picking up Maureen and her son Michael, we’d knead the dough and put it in a bowl in the back of my station wagon. The sun’s heat through the rear window produced a perfect environment for rising dough, and after swimming, we’d go punch it down and form loaves — before heading to Big Tom’s for grilled cheese sandwiches. By the time we got home, the bread would be ready for the oven.

Somewhere along the way, other demands on my life displaced bread making, but a few winters back, a friend introduced me to Jeff Hertzberg’s “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.” Once I got the hang of Hertzberg’s fast, efficient process, I was back to regular bread making. But it required a 500-degree oven, and reluctance to heat up the kitchen in July soon dampened my enthusiasm. I needed a way to make bread that wouldn’t occupy whole days, but also wouldn’t roast me out of my home.

Enter sourdough.

Provenance matters in the world of sourdough. My sourdough starter came from my friend Karen, whose character and culinary skills I admire.

Compared to traditional yeast bread, sourdough is handled more often but for shorter periods. After mixing and resting, the dough is “turned” — stretched and folded back on itself — every 30 minutes for three or four hours. Though it can be shaped and baked after that, I prefer to refrigerate it overnight and bake it out first thing in the morning — that warming fragrance early in the day is well worth the effort!

Perfecting my technique has produced six or seven loaves most weeks. I text bread photos to family and friends. I leave bread gifts next to the neighbor’s paper and force partial loaves on unwitting friends out for quiet walks. The neighborhood views me with the same apprehension they might hold for a zucchini grower.

But it’s all worth it, because fresh bread slathered with butter is simply the best.

Those jeans, however, may get tossed after all. Keeping clothes one size too small is sentimental; two sizes, suggests too much bread, and that’s impossible. Call me content.

Mary Gentry, who moved to Olympia in 1966, has worked in education and law, served on many non-profit boards and is a director for Olympia Federal Savings. She has published two collections of essays, “Quite Contrary” and “Too Far from the Tree.” She is a member of The Olympian’s 2020 Board of Contributors. Reach her at mgentrystoryteller@gmail.com