Food Friday: Home-baked carbs

Art by Jean Sanders

Timing is everything. We have figured out how to cope with winter temperatures – we have been fueling ourselves with home-baked carbs. And next week, just in time for the mercurial temperatures to hover in the 50s, we’ll be smug and satisfied, schmearing good Irish butter across the firm crumb of our rustic boule bread, hot and fresh from our oven. No longer will we be be longing for crisp loaves from fancy French bakeries. I won’t be drooling over the luscious baked goods porn I see every minute on Instagram. We are no longer snow-bound, and one of us has mastered one tiny aspect of bread baking, which is an empowering life skill. Maybe, when spring finally rolls around, we’ll be good at something.

It really began when it was so cold outside a couple of weeks ago, and inside, the house seemed glacial. We tend to spend a lot of time reading and working in the kitchen, which always seems cooler than the rest of the house, unless we have the oven turned on. It is probably because in the kitchen there are French doors and several windows with views of the sunrise, the moon rise, the back yard, and the bird feeders. The kitchen, as the realtors like to say, is the heart of the house. We often stop our important newspaper reading to gaze with slack-jawed wonder at the Three Stooges squirrels who are constantly flinging themselves with abandon through the pecan trees. Luke the wonder dog goes out to the back yard through those French doors whenever he senses the threatening presence of the feral cats from next door. It is a hard room to keep consistently warm.

It started innocently enough, with the arrival of the January/February 2025 Cook’s Illustrated magazine. After I flipped through it, I tossed it to Mr. Sanders, and casually suggested that he read the Handmade Rustic Boule article: Rarely can one identify a signifying moment of life-change with such precision. He was hooked. Immediately. Who knew that bread flour, yeast, water and salt could be so transformative? And this is after the yearslong practice of baking home-made Friday Night Pizza with the same ingredients. Bread is different; it is slower, more exacting, more challenging. And satisfying, because we have enjoyed eating the crusty, chewy loaves for several days each. Not only was it good for sopping up garlicky spaghetti sauce, it was the perfect foil for a bowl of steaming beef stew. We are having it for lunch with Trader Joe’s burrata and tomatoes, and we’ll have more tonight it with sausage and peppers. It makes a great firm slab of toast for breakfast – hale and hearty. Carbs doing a body good, and keeping us warm.

Mr. Sanders is a baker. He relishes precision: rising times, ingredient weights, oven temperatures. I am more of a biscuit kind of baker – give me the freedom of immediate gratification. In fact, I am probably a better consumer than I am a baker. This might be the perfect symbiotic relationship – he bakes, and I eat…

This is a link to the America’s Test Kitchen recipe – be careful – they only let you have access to a couple of recipes a month. Rustic Bread Primer

Mr. Sanders found this helpful video: Cook’s Illustrated Boule Bread

Our friends at Food52 have another recipe for a rustic bread, also baked in a Dutch oven – you can bet that theirs is deelish, too: Food52 Rustic Italian bread

Here is my secret family recipe for biscuits, also good for breakfast, lunch or dinner; just not as delicious as home-baked bread. Perfect if you need something hot and fast, which also delivers a powerful payload of delicious melty butter: Bisquick Biscuits

Stay warm!

“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ’em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ’em.”
― Shel Silverstein

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.