Trying Not to Kill the Yeast

Bread baking is a task I have always approached with fear and trembling. As a kid, baking bread was portrayed as a great feat requiring profound skill to produce a loaf which had successfully risen and cooked through without becoming too tough. It was clear that there were plenty of ways to ruin bread and end up with something far more akin to a rock than a light, life-giving substance.

Nevertheless, last weekend I had a strong urge to attempt the impossible. Ideas of homemaking and generative creativity swirling in my mind, I wanted to try my hand at the deeply grounded experience of making bread. Using a recipe book written in the 1940’s (which also cautioned the difficulty of baking bread for the first time), I began the process.

I carefully scalded the milk and mixed in the butter, sugar, and salt. Then the first struggle, waiting for the milk to cool. It was a painstaking experience, but absolutely necessary because if the yeast is exposed to too much heat it will die, which means the bread won’t rise. Slowly, the fat of the milk and butter released its heat. Stirring with a wooden spoon, I had probably ten minutes, which felt closer to an hour, to wait. Stirring, and stirring, and stirring, using all of my patience to create an environment hospitable to the life I was hoping to introduce.

Finally, the milk was at the correct temperature. I added the yeast, mixed in the flour, and had the delightfully meditative experience of kneading the dough and at last set it in a bowl to rise overnight. I did all of this cooking late Saturday night, so it was Sunday morning when I awoke to discover the bread rose. After church I kneaded the dough again, left it to rise some more, and eventually separated it into four separate loaves which were set into pans, and some forty minutes later the first two loaves almost magically appeared out of the oven.

The sense which has stuck with me over the last few days is the goodness which comes from waiting. Baking bread involves significant periods of downtime, and it all seems to revolve around the yeast. After scalding the milk, a necessary process for breaking down the milk’s proteins and creating more sugars for the yeast to consume, the milk has to come back down to a cooler temperature or else the yeast will die. Then, once the flour has been added to the milky mixture, the dough is left to sit for hours, preferably overnight. The yeast needs time to live and work and go through the chemical processes which eventually cause the bread to rise and reach the desired texture. My mantra through this process was don’t kill the yeast.

In a lot of ways, that is my metaphor these days: I’m trying not to kill the yeast. This weekend I had the opportunity to watch a fellow student offer a solo performance which poignantly stared into the face of death theoretical and personal. The play was beautiful, and it seemed clear that the woman offering her work was deeply emotionally connected to what she was saying about death and dying. Her rawness and vulnerability were palpable in the room, and it struck me to the core. This sort of work, the work of being honest with fear and grief, is what I want to be doing. She was able to present her laments from depths I have not even begun to reach these last few weeks, and to see and experience it was in no small way crushing and shame inducing.

Dear self, try not to kill the yeast.

Just as I had to remind myself to wait for the milk to cool, I’ve been reminding myself that I’m in the middle of a process. I am hoping that this season of Lent is a journey moving me closer to health and holiness. The steps I have taken in that direction have been very active of late: changing how I interact with social media, shaving my head, writing regular blogs. And yet, this week reminds me that not all movement towards growth looks the same. Sometimes, the best growth can only happen by waiting.

As I was waiting for the milk to cool I was attentive to it, stirring it and testing the temperature so as to be ready when the time was right. Waiting is not passive. It is standing alert and expectantly, ready to move forward at a moment’s notice. I long to lament in a way that is raw and comes from the core of my person. But in the words of a friend, you can’t force emotional self-states. I can’t force myself to feel sad and to grieve childhood losses. What I can do, however, is wait. I can be attentive to the memories as they surface in a season of anniversaries, and I can trust that this work of mindfulness and intentionality is preparing so that when grief and rawness actually feel present I might be able to meet them and invite them into a hospitable environment.