BREAKING BREAD
Students spend part of vacation week rolling the dough at baking workshop
WOONSOCKET — The dough seemed to be fighting back, but Anthony Candelario wasn’t giving up.
Amid the scent of fresh yeast and flour, the Woonsocket Middle School seventh-grader pushed his palms into the golden blob again and again, coaxing the stubbornly glutenous mass into oven-ready shape.
“When you go to the supermarket, it looks pretty hard – everything’s a mess,” said Candelario. “This is way easier than I thought it was going to be.”
Candelario’s first experience making bread was all part of a two-day workshop at the Millrace Kitchen, co-sponsored by NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley, the owner of the facility, and Norwich, Vermont-based King Arthur Flour. Longtime baker Emily Lisker, a city resident, teamed up with Millrace Kitchen client, Chef Roscoe Gay, to run the workshop for 20 students from WMS and Woonsocket High School who would normally be busy in NeighborWorks’ after-school programs at the C3 Center, except school’s out this week.
With yeast, two kinds of flour and instructional materials provided free by King Arthur, Gay and Lisker guided the bread-baking newbies through the essentials of preparing the dough from
scratch, letting it rise and rest, kneading and then shaping it into twists, loaves and rolls. They got to sample some of the results, but most of the finished products were donated to Community Care Alliance’s food pantry, in keeping with the traditions of King Arthur’s “Baking for Good” program.
After making the dough and letting it rest overnight in the chiller, the students returned to the kitchen the following day to wrestle it into shape and get it in the oven – all of which can be trickier than it sounds. Gluten, a wheat protein that gives dough its elastic quality, doesn’t much appreciate getting pushed around.
“Everybody take a break,” says Gay. “The more you keep working it the tougher it’s going to get and it’s going to be really nasty dough.”
A self-taught, self-employed baker who runs Every 1’s Chef, Gay is a VISTA volunteer for NeighborWorks as well as a client of the Millrace Kitchen. He uses the facility as NeighborWorks envisioned – as a community resource to help launch culinary-based business startups.
Every 1’s Chef is a custom cake and catering business that Gay runs out of the community kitchen, located at 40 South Main St. – the former Mulvey’s Hardware Store.
It was Lisker who proposed the bread-baking workshop after learning about the program from King Arthur. Gay was excited about teaming up on the project with Lisker, a local artist and veteran baker who has strong ties to NeighborWorks.
“She is like a guru for bread,” says Gay.
Lisker baked dozens of loaves at home just to practice for the workshop, to make sure everything would go smoothly.
Though Gay calls her the bread guru, Lisker prefers to think of herself as “a preacher for bread.” In a food culture rife with fad diets and the demonization of carbohydrates, bread often gets a bad rap, and Lisker is doing everything she can to resurrect its despoiled reputation with missionary zeal.
“I’ve been baking bread for 40 years,” says Lisker. “It’s vital. Look at the world – every culture has a bread. There’s pita, pizza, tortilla...how bad could it be?”
Sure, bread’s a carbohydrate-rich staple, but the problem with the American diet isn’t bread – it’s that people eat too many carbohydrates from unhealthy sources – fast foods, processed foods and soda, for example.
It turns out the Millrace Kitchen is a great place to put bread back on the path of righteousness.
“It’s great to have this kitchen here,” she says. “It’s conducive to teaching and learning, and that’s what this workshop is all about.”
The students made their loaves and buns by mixing yeast, water and two kinds of flour – traditional white and whole wheat – to come up with a palatable blend that’s nutritious but not as heavy as a purely whole wheat loaf. Lisker says she likes mixing white flour with other grains because it serves as a nutrient-rich catalyst for the yeast, which dough needs to rise.
As the second day of the workshop got under way, Lisker seized on a useful instructional metaphor to explain the essence of bread to her student bakers: it’s like a living, breathing organism.
“It’s alive,” she says. “After letting the bread rest overnight, the metaphor still stands – we’re waking up the bread.”
Just like a person rising from a deep sleep, “the bread’s a little grumpy” because the glutens are still tight. It needs to ease into the day before it’s ready for work.
Raheem Baywume, a WHS freshman, seemed pleased with the preliminary re- sults as he carefully arranged his creations – cinnamon rolls – onto an aluminum baking sheet.
“They look good,” he says. NeighborWorks spokeswoman Meg Rego says giving bread away to the needy is a great lesson in civics for youngster, but time in the kitchen is also a good way for students to apply lessons from multiple disciplines they’re involved in at school.
“From the appropriate measuring techniques to the chemical reaction that occurs when yeast gets into the dough and makes the bread rise,” said Rego, “learning to bake bread is truly an education in math and science as well as the culinary arts.”
Students worked in small groups, so they also learn the importance of teamwork.
“I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to get the local youth involved with the Millrace Kitchen and learn the long lost skill of baking delicious bread,” said Millrace Kitchen Manager Tamara Burman. “I also thought the community component of donating the bread to our local pantry was a nice piece of the program. We know that our local pantries can always use food donations, so this looked like a win-win for everyone.”
This probably won’t be the last dalliance with bread for NeighborWorks – or youngsters in the public school system. Last year, NeighborWorks won a $10,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation to build an outdoor bread oven at 40 South Main St.
Like its Millrace Kitchen, NeighborWorks envisions the outdoor oven as a community resource that will be shared with educational and private organizations for a variety of events.
Lisker says the oven is now in the design stage. NeighborWorks has hired a contractor who is developing the plans.