Taking to Baking

By HP-Time

It stands fragrantly like a bride at the altar, awaiting the embrace of fresh butter and an osculation of jam. It is a loaf of bread. Not the cellophaned Kleenex sold at the supermarket but a homemade loaf, crusty, crumbly and a succor for the eater.

As a result of the sorry state of commercial bread in the U.S. more and more Americans are taking to baking. James Beard's elegant book on breadmaking (Beard on Bread, Knopf) has sold a phenomenal 50,000 copies since October --at $7.95 apiece. Fleischmann, the G.M. of leaveners, reports a first-quarter increase over last year of more than 40% in sales of yeast, a sine qua non of most serious breads.

A simple homemade loaf can cost --not including labor cost--about half as much to produce as the presliced, vitaminized, super-enriched, deflavorized belly wadding advertised on TV. It can not only have toothsome flavor and infinite variety, but may represent a return to simple joy, as raising one's own corn or tomatoes does, or planting a pear tree, or hunting wild berries for jelly.

Weekend Loafers. A great many of the new weekend breadmakers are men who would rather loaf than golf. To Manfred J. Sobek, 42, marketing vice president for Simmons International Ltd.(they make their bread from beds), this means a Sunday afternoon baking Viennese Strietzel, a kind of raisin bread. Sobek, who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., also confects German Christmas bread, French bread, succulent Austrian tarts with buttercream and apple strudel. By 1951, when he first arrived in the U.S. from his native Germany, he explains, "I had this tremendous feeling of nostalgia. Holidays in Europe are accompanied by a grand flurry in the kitchen and the great aroma of baking. I had to re-create that somehow."

Mrs. Paul Baerman took up breadmaking when she and her husband moved to Atlanta from San Francisco, a mecca of crust. Apart from its delicious hot breads, "Atlanta was a wasteland as far as good bread goes," she recalls. Her favorite recipe--and that of many other amateur loafers interviewed by TIME--is for Julia Child's French bread, which also gets high praise from Beard. Other specialties of Mrs. Baer-man's are French croissants and brioches, as well as sourdough bread, which has a tart flavor imparted by a quirky starter, the homemade leavening agent that gold-rush miners used to prize almost as highly as tailings.

Another spare-time kneader, the California Institute of Technology's director of publications Ed Hutchings Jr., 60, of Altadena, bakes loaves of "basic white" with bran or wheat germ each Saturday. "Kapow!" he says over the stove. "If you've got any frustrations, this is the way to get rid of them."

Tom Smith, a food-service-chain executive in Atlanta, learned to bake in college when he was taking courses in food management. His specialty is a rich, glazed bread coated with poppy seeds that is adapted from the traditional Jewish recipe for challa, the Sabbath loaf. One reason his do-it-yourself bread is superior, he points out, is that he uses milk and eggs, whereas "in commercial breads they use powdered milk and water. As a result, a slice of bakery bread left out in the air dries out quickly. Also, most commercial breads are batter-whipped, not kneaded, and that makes a big difference in texture." Several summer vacationers, who have added inches to their waistlines on the irresistible Portuguese sweet bread made on Cape Cod, have smuggled the recipe back home and are now helping the yeast, butter and honey industries to expand along with them.

Most home bakers today produce a couple of loaves in one session, one to slice, one to store in the freezer--which is like a wine connoisseur putting a Richebourg burgundy in the cellar. Baking is as rewarding as many varieties of collecting and crafting, with the added rise of seeing a loaf disappear at the breakfast table as swiftly as if it had been attacked by a horde of soldier ants. As James Beard observes: "It is a mysterious business, this making of bread. Once you are hooked by the miracle of yeast, you'll be a breadmaker for life."

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