When I was a kid there was an excellent bakery within walking distance of my house. The part of the shop where customers could stand was tiny, the rest of it was completely taken over by gigantic mixers, mills, and ovens. Every week or two my mom and I would go down to his store in an otherwise completely nondescript strip mall and be transported to another time. The owner was an old man, although I’m sure he wasn’t nearly as old as I thought he was, who would give children free samples of his bread with a little butter and honey on them. This was wildly effective because the bread was delicious and it was so wholesome that parents really couldn’t resist buying a loaf. He had a wonderful, chewy whole wheat loaf that was perfect for sandwiches or toast.
In my town there is also a long-established restaurant with several locations, they pride themselves on their beer selection and hearty food. At this restaurant they gave you a free basket of beer bread from this local bakery. It was completely unlike any beer bread I’ve had before or since. Instead of being a quick bread like banana bread this was a chewy, yeasted bread that smelled and tasted deliciously of an amber beer. No bitterness but distinctly beer. This bread tasted exactly how I hope a pint of beer will taste, leading to perpetual disappointment when I instead taste hops.
Years later, the man who owned the bakery died unexpectedly. People were shocked and saddened, he hadn’t exactly been a character around town but in our neighborhood he was a fixture. His adult children announced they had his recipes and would continue making and selling his breads. The thing is, his children had never made bread with their father or at least not often and not recently. They followed the recipes but the bread was horrible, really inedibly bad. Any baker knows that you can follow the recipe to the letter but if you don’t know how to adjust for things like humidity, temperature, flour protein differences, etc. you’ll end up with horrible bread. No one ever figured out what the children were doing wrong, including the children, they closed the shop a few months later.
The beer bread disappeared from the restaurants, I asked a waiter once whether they had considered trying to make it in house. He said no one besides the original baker knew the recipe. It’s been about ten years since he died. A few days ago I made a wonderful pumpkin soup. It’s balanced to not be too sweet, it’s taken lots of experimentation to get this soup right but it’s still missing something. I sat down to lunch today with a bowl of this soup and almost cried when I realized that what this soup needs is a toasted slice of whole wheat bread, still slightly chewy and warm to dip into it. A slice of bread I can never have again.
