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Toilet paper isn’t the only thing in short supply these quarantined days.
If you get to the store early enough, you can buy bread…but you can’t find yeast.
It seems that everyone in their first few weeks of confinement has decided to take up bread baking. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a kind of good thing. Bread baking is meditative. It engages all the senses. It takes time.
All of us have time on our hands these days. Time to read. Time to figure out how to Zoom. Time to connect with friends. Time to nap. Time to mow the lawn.
And, time to bake bread, or at least try your hand at baking bread. If you’ve never done it before, it’s a bit tricky, but it is worth it for the glorious way it makes your house smell.
My husband is a bread baker. Always has been and he’s proud of it. When he was a professor and teaching full time, he didn’t bake bread every day, but he almost always baked bread when we had company for dinner. But now, in his retirement and our present confinement, he has time. And, he’s baking bread for us, not every day, but many days.
However, he’s running out of yeast. So, he did what everyone in their fragile right mind is doing at the moment, he searched the internet for a yeast source.
The search took the better part of a week of poking around here and there before he got lucky. At first, he found some yeast, but all the information was in Japanese and the language barrier made the transaction seem a bit risky. He wasn’t sure what he might actually be ordering. Then, a couple of days ago, he struck gold.
He found a source, in English. However, there was, as there often is, a catch. He had to buy in bulk. Like two pounds of yeast. And, without hesitation, he ordered it. Thirty-five dollars including shipping and obviously worth it if you have time on your hands and love to bake bread.
Why two pounds? His new-found two-pound gold mine of yeast was meant for commercial bakeries.
Let me break this down for you. You know that little package of yeast you get at the grocery store. The one that you use to make one loaf of bread? That’s just over ¼ of an ounce of yeast.
Do the math: there are four loaves of bread in every ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, multiplied by 2 pounds…or, the potential of baking 128 loaves of bread using two pounds of yeast.
There are only two of us sheltering in place at home. Between breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, we may use one and a half loaves of bread a week. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say we eat two small loaves of bread a week. That’s 64 weeks of homemade bread from two pounds of yeast that could take us from April 2020 to the end of July 2021. And, probably further if you figure that there will be some afternoons when we might want crackers and soup for lunch instead of a sandwich made with homemade bread.
I like bread. In fact, I love homemade bread. But 128 loaves?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but, sure as another loaf of bread is rising in the pan, I sincerely hope the curve of this disease will flatten or a vaccine will have been developed before July 2021 and we will be back to a life that lets us go out and about our business again to bakeries and restaurants and concerts and movies and dinner with friends.
