Bread can be symbolic. It has a powerful history, evokes, and reflects time, place, and tradition. Bread alters civilizations and changes the dynamics within and of peoples. Everything in this world exists to be shared, to be broken, to be lived. Baking bread requires simple ingredients, but requires play with time. There is no better way to expand space than with a ceremony of bread making.
With endless resources of recipes online, this page is meant more to give pause and to allow for space to lead from your own intuition, rather than give precise direction and the occasional easter eggs of musings. This site breathes from the deepest desire to share a love of baking with others, baking for others, baking for self, to find our own pace of meditative activity, to share, and to experience deeply. For more shenanigans and a few more recipes, visit mskarenman.com or subscribe to my recorded and rearranged streams of consciousness on Substack.
Baking can be an extension of meditation. It starts with an intention of mindfulness–how to feel and therefore how to imprint that feeling in practice. There are enough recipes on the internet to keep us looking for the next loaf. The practice, however, is slow down, find a few recipes, practice, share those recipes, observe and repeat. Allow in the awareness of the natural cycles. Bridge the external and internal. Make it a whole, felt experience.
Exploring new colors can drive creation. This is Hopi blue corn flatbreads with about 20% corn and 80% soft wheat. The natural sourdough fermentation altered the dough’s final color. Get heirloom grains like this at Barton Springs Mill. Find a local miller in the US and Canada at Amy Halloran’s website and troubleshoot your loaf at bread.blog.
Oftentimes we have bits of ingredients that we haven’t found use for or are left over from a previous recipe. Here are biscuits made with mustard butter (butter plus whole grain mustard, made for enjoying with pretzels), frozen milk (because I had to go out of town and couldn’t throw away A2 milk), discard starter (to add acidity since I had no buttermilk), and 50 grams or so of coconut milk. As long as the proportions of fat, grain, leavening, salt, and liquid are in a ratio meant for biscuits, chances are the effort will reflect time and place.
