Artisanal bread

 

     Well ... it's been an interesting couple days, since Monday night when, tired from a long day and with a full house of kids and a granddaughter, I wrote this and went to bed, only to wake up Tuesday and find out Jesse Jackson had died, shortly after midnight.
     So I clawed this post back, and put up Jackson's obituary in its place. It seemed the right news judgment call ("Hmmm, country bread or the death of a major national figure? Let's go ... with the ... bread.") 

     Then Wednesday I ran the column the paper asked me to write about Jackson's passing. Now things have quieted down, for the moment, so it's back to artisanal bread. Apologies to the 49 readers who read this before 5 a.m. Tuesday, when I took it down. And if there are any new readers from the ... 2 million hits the Jackson obituary received (thank you Apple News!) the way the blog works is, we usually have subjects of some kind of topical interest but, given the blog's quotidian nature (every ... goddamn ... day) sometimes we plumb the depths of the truly trivial. Which is also what happens to take up the bulk of all our lives, so it does remind us: the small stuff is important too.

     Often I snap photographs for the purpose of sharing them with you, here. But that is not why I took the above. Central Street in front of Hewn Bakery was jammed with cars one recent Sunday, and rather than park a block or two away, I pulled into an illegal space, left my wife guarding the car, and ran in to check out the situation, breadwise. 

     We had never been to Hewn, but my wife had heard good things about it and suggested a visit, post brunch with the kids at Blind Faith. I took the photo, then hurried back outside to show her the bread selection. We discussed our options, and settled on an rye with oats, which did indeed prove to be quite good.

     You would think that, being raised on Wonder bread and, later, Buttercrust, which was basically Wonder dyed yellow with some corn meal sprinkled on the top, that I would retain some residual nostalgia for garbage white bread. But I really don't. Except under very unusual circumstances — say being served a metal plate of barbecue at a joint in Memphis, or a Kentucky Hot Brown, I never want to see another slice of white bread for the rest of my life. Someday I'm going to write something about the food I was served as a child. But I'm not ready yet. I think I'm going to wait a few years, to make sure my mother is good and dead, and won't claw out of the grave and get me for my indiscretion. 
     Returning to Hewn, which also has an outlet in Wilmette (and a third in Libertyville, thank you, Charles Troy). My wife is addicted to pecan rolls, so I grabbed one of those for her as well.

     Any thoughts on the name "Hewn"? I get that it is supposed to evoke the hardy artisan, powerful forearms coated with flour, drawing rough loafs from the primordial essence of natural grains and yeast and such, plunging them on wooden boards into wood-fired ovens. A name redolent of adzes and wide plank floors. But it still, to me, would be better attached to a line of ranch oak furniture, chairs with the bark still on the legs, and such. "Do you want some of this bread? It was hewn by me..." is not a question one leaps to answer with an emphatic "yes!"
     Moving on. If this seems a bit light, well, my oldest, his wife and the granddaughter, now 8 months, showed up Monday afternoon. I wish I could share her photo with you, but the chance that the cuteness might burn your retinas is too great, and I can't risk the liability. As it is, her mesmeric presence caused me to forget all responsibility, organized thought, or concern for anything that wasn't being bounced on my knee. I spent the day making sputtering noises, widening my eyes, breaking into insane grins, singing from my vast array of 1920s pop hits learned from my mother, who could sing far better than she could cook. Tunes such as "April Showers" and "Toot-Toot-Tootsie Goodbye" and not thinking for a single moment what I might post here. The results speak for themselves. The good news is that I will have to, somehow, ignore all that in the morning  and turn out a newspaper column of some sort. But you'll have to wait for that until Wednesday. Assuming I can draw myself away from the Concentrated Essence of all Sweetness and Adorableness in the Known Universe long enough to do it.