Knead On
on embodied learning
I’d heard a strange rumor that you can only buy bread yeast from the pharmacy. Though I’d been living in Italy for a few months at this point, my limited language skills necessitated help from a native ally. I asked the token bread-baker in my class. She hails from Puglia, after all; she lives and breathes bread.
"Oh, you want to buy yeast? I can just give you some of mine."
The following day, I had a jarful of sourdough starter in my hands. The following week, I was madly scribbling down my friend’s sourdough recipe, which I later found out was more of a starting point than a hard, set rule. Don’t forget to add your salt, she warned. I asked her how much salt, expecting her answer to be on the order of a gram or a fraction of a teaspoon. Instead, she held out her hand: this much.
Noted.
She instructed that this bread was to be made “ad occhio,” and I shared with her that we had a similar phrase in English: “to eyeball” a recipe.
“I kneaded from my hips, coordinated my arms and legs, and shifted my weight like I did in my dancing days. ”
For good measure, I copied the starting ratios of starter-to-flour-to-water and watched my classmate sift a mound of flour directly on top of her wooden table. Softly, she cratered the center and poured the liquid ingredients. What started as a small swirling gesture with her two fingers gradually involved her whole body as more and more of the flour was incorporated into the dough. I stood there, mesmerized, because it almost looked as if the dough was moving her.
Then, I tried my hand at kneading, noting the visual cues and memorizing them in my hands. Like an earlobe to the touch, I thought.
“Use your legs,” she reminded me. A pencil holding up my hair, flour across my forehead, I kneaded from my hips, coordinated my arms and legs, and shifted my weight like I did in my dancing days. It helped to close my eyes so that I could feel the dough start to resist my hands. I felt grounded, yet agile, in the circular motion of gathering and pushing.
I asked her how I would know when the dough is sufficiently worked.
“Your hands will be clean. You will know.”
Will I?
“You’ll know,” she repeated.
If you haven’t figured out by now, dear reader, I should come clean with one earnest fact: I'm the farthest thing from calling myself a baker. Plop me in front of floured work surface and I'm rife with questions that border on the existential: too much water? Not enough? Why does the dough stick to the board? How do I know it’s done proofing? How do I know it’s done baking?
How do I know anything for that matter?
The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know any of it, but learning to trust my body in its search for tactile answers may be the first step towards embodying the knowledge associated with food-making. Recipes, sure, will remind me what to do, but my senses trump all that and ground me in a perpetual state of embodied learning. My hands know in ways that my eyes could never gauge; and, my nose will know before any timer when that sourdough crust is perfectly craggled.
To deliberately dance with the unknown and dispel its uncertainties is perhaps life’s greatest reward or, at least, that’s what my stomach can attest to after batches and batches of lopsided bread boules.
It’s been over a year since my Pugliese friend imparted her bread manifesto to me and I’m still tickled by the sheer mess I can generate with a floured work surface. Rather than bury myself in self-doubt, I’ve been intentionally practicing bread so that these hands-on moments become part of my being as I continue to knead and come to know, repeating until the whole process becomes embodied knowledge.
Maya received a B.S. in dietetics and recently completed her masters degree in Food Culture and Communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences. She really digs the way fermentation lets us peek into the relationship between humans and microbes, and is currently interning at the Nordic Food Lab.