Rich Mintz  

Here’s the “country bread” recipe I use these days. Start to finish, it takes about 2 hours and 15 minutes. It’s adapted from Mark Bittman’s pizza dough recipe, and it’s really, really forgiving. All of the proportions can be changed by as much as about 40 percent, the rising or baking times can be cut by a third, without causing it to fail; you’ll just end up with a drier or moister or fluffier or flatter loaf. Bread is surprisingly easy to make (or perhaps not that surprising, when you think about the fact that hundreds of millions of people, many of them vastly stupider than you, have done it successfully for five thousand years).

Place about a tablespoon of yeast (about 1/3 of an envelope) in a big heavy bowl. Add about a cup of warm water (not too hot, just warmish), a spoonful or two of honey or sugar, and a teaspoon of salt. (You probably want to add more salt than you think you do.) Maybe a splash of olive oil if you feel like it. Stir and wait a few minutes.

Pour in about a cup of flour and half a cup of cornmeal. You can use all white flour, or half whole wheat flour if you like. If you want to add any herbs, like parsley or rosemary or chervil, or pepper or other spices, do it now. Stir to combine.

Add 1 1/2 to 2 cups of additional flour or so, in 5 or 6 portions, stirring to combine after each portion. When the dough gets too massy to stir, start mixing with your hands. When it starts to form a ball, start kneading in the bowl. (“Kneading” means: fold over in half, press hard with the flat of your hand, rotate 90 degrees, repeat.) The dough should clean most of the loose flour and bits off the edge of the bowl as you work. Try to add as little flour as you can, so that the dough stays moist without being sticky.

Knead for 5 to 10 minutes, until the dough starts to feel like dough rather than batter (i.e., it has some springback when you poke your finger into it).

Form the dough into a ball, roll it in a tiny bit of olive oil so it’s not dry, put it back in the bowl, cover it with a wet paper towel, put it in a warm place (e.g., on top of the refrigerator), and forget about it for an hour.

When you come back in an hour, it should be roughly twice the size it was. Punch it down to its original size, stretch it into a slightly loafier shape, and set it on a cookie sheet that you’ve prepared with a thin coat of olive oil and a little cornmeal. Cover it with the wet paper towel and go away for anywhere between 15 minutes and another hour.

Put it in the oven on an upper shelf, then turn the oven on to 425 degrees. (If you put it in before you turn on the oven, the loaf will continue rising a bit while the oven heats.) Go away for about half an hour (bake it a little longer than you think you should; it’s moist in the middle), then come back and take it out of the oven. It’s bread!

I spent the long weekend with friends whose produce-buying, cooking, and eating habits are better than my own — some CSA and co-op members, some vegetarians, an actual cookbook author, even someone who lives Way Out in the Country. With my supermarket-produce-buying ways (choosing carefully, and interspersed with periodic farmer’s market visits, to be sure), I felt seriously outclassed. It’s too late to sign up for a CSA for this season, and I can’t stand the customer experience at Whole Foods (aka “Look How Not Good Enough You Are”), but I did stop down the block at Zeytuna last night to pick up a bunch of New Jersey blueberries and Ontario tomatoes (could be worse, at least New Jersey and Ontario both actually border New York).

Tonight, in the heat, I’m sitting inside with the fan running, making a fresh gazpacho and a loaf of country bread. Below you see the dough rising, in the same bowl I’ve been using for kneading bread (and for almost nothing else) for twenty years.

This bowl has been cracked and mended at least twice, but I keep it around. It connects me to a period of my life that’s long over (and the period after that, and the period after that), and taking it out of the cabinet is a frank reminder that although things may change on the surface, I’m the same person underneath that I was in 1990.