Bread: Machine Vs. Handmade

Here’s a challenge: can you tell the difference between handmade and machine made bread? Handmade means no mixers, no dough hooks, and no electronic devices of any kind until it’s time to pop those risen loaves or rolls in the oven. If taste buds can’t tell a significant difference, why would anyone choose an old-fashioned technique to do a job?

I had a bread machine for years and used it when I taught so I could come home to the comforting aroma of baking bread that accompanied the meal simmering in my crockpot. It was a way to produce home-cooked food without having to eat European style at 8 or 9 p.m. 

Whether it was my imagination or not, I thought handmade bread tasted better, so when I had time, I skipped the plug-in contraption and learned to crank out a pan of rolls or golden loaves nearly as fast as I could measure ingredients into the mixing bucket and push buttons. Along the way, I discovered hand mixing and kneading reduced stress that knotted my shoulders and made my head ache. The fragrance was a bonus, but bread machine provide that as well so it can’t factor into the debate.

Recently, a friend and I quibbled over the merits of hand vs. machine made. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. You get the smell, taste, and freshness both ways. What you don’t find with appliance-made bread is the sensory delight of combining flour, oil, eggs, water, sugar, salt, and yeast into dough.

The other day I mixed five cups of flour into a soppy yeast sponge with my fingers and then kneaded the result until it was ready to rise. Creating that recipe, I realized I relish this aspect of bread making. It returns me to those wondrous childhood days when friends and I spent hours mixing dirt and water to a perfect consistency to manufacture loaf and pie-shaped mud confections to bake on broiling summer sidewalks and driveways. 

I should’ve recognized the warning signs of becoming an artisan baker even then because my companions always tired of this activity before I did. I’ve exchanged gooey, thick mud for sticky dough squishing between my fingers, but that sensation of preparing ingredients to the perfect consistency and then forming them into shapes ready for hot cement or oven is the satisfying part of both activities. 

The good news is my stress-busting, adult bread-making smells much better than the muddy concoctions of my youth. In addition, dirt pies never make it in the door let alone to the table when you talk about flavor or sanitation.  Bread rules over mud pies any day of the week.

In truth, it doesn’t matter that you use a bread machine or Kitchen Aide mixer to crank out a warm, crusty loaf. No matter how you make it, you produce that yeasty aroma that says all is well with the world and fresh flavor you won’t find in plastic-bag-encased-slices on grocery store shelves.

The real difference is that hand-made bread allows bakers to experience the evolution of dough from sticky glop to an elastic mound that sounds like a baby’s behind when patted. For those who savor touch as well as flavor in culinary creations, we’re compelled to dig in to our elbows to fully enjoy the flavors that satisfy our stomachs and spirits.

Holiday Baking Cooks Up Memories

As soon as nights get longer and colder, I find myself scouring cook books and magazines for festive recipes.  The irony is that I may whip up one of two of these temptations, but always, always, I return to childhood standbys.  While new flavors tease family taste buds, traditional recipes comfort and connect us to loved ones and times long gone.

A perfect example is my faded and speckled fudge recipe written on a tiny scrap of yellow paper.  I remember as a new bride calling my mom  for instructions to make my husband our family’s old-fashion fudge.  Every time I place that yellow square by the stove, I recall standing at the phone  that night, connecting with home which was hundreds of miles away.  I had a new little house and loving husband, but talking to my mother reminded me of the family that nurtured me and of happy childhood Christmases. 

Recently, I discovered the original fudge recipe printed in my great-grandmother’s Searchlight Cookbook, which my grandmother gave to me. It made me wonder how many aunts, cousins, and other relation had  mailed or called either Great Grandma or Grandma to learn to make this family favorite.  How many of them felt momentarily transported to their loved one’s kitchen and then stood over their own stove while feeling their mom’s or grandma’s presence.

Not only did my mother make amazing holiday fudge, she also let my brother and me help her bake red and green sugar cookies each Christmas.  We would add ingredients she had measured, and then we’d watch as she turned flour, sugar, eggs, and more into  a soft, sweet dough that she’d let us roll into  small balls.  (I wonder if she knows how many of those pre-baked cookies we sampled . . .) 

Once Kent and I laid out even lines of cookies  in a 3 x 4 design on her rectangular baking sheet, Mom would carry out three little dishes—one filled with red sprinkles, one with green, and one with a drizzle of water.  She gave us each a flat-bottomed glass to dip first in the water and then in one color of sprinkles.  Our job was to flatten the dough ball, imbedding the colored sugar.  To this day, Christmas brings those sparkling green and red cookies to mind.

Marriage means more than joining lives, it means joining traditions, so I added my husband’s favorite cookie to my baking repertoire.  His famiy emigrated from Switzerland in the early 1900s and brought their linzer tart recipe with them to Kansas.  That concoction of ground almonds, flour, cinnamon, sugar, egg whites, and strawberry jam now graces Christmas plates in Kansas and Tennessee.  

Cream candy, forgotten cookies, frosted sugar cookies, fudge, linzer tarts, and more keep not only our house but our daughters’ smelling like  holiday confectionary shoppes.  However, it isn’t just the scent of baking that permeates the air, it’s  generations of family memories tickling our noses. 

I like to think that I’m not the only one who reminiscences while cooking.  When my daughters use family recipes, I hope they sense their mom, mom-in-law, their grandmas, their greats, great-greats, and great-great-greats in the kitchen.  No wonder it sometimes feels a little crowded during holiday baking.