Dough Boy

Hey Sweet Friend,

I skipped last week because I wanted to teach myself a new animation process for my third music video with my friends Decliner, who you may remember from my newsletter on the longest line in Michigan.

Instead, I tested positive for “the Covid.” The main symptom I experienced was the “brain scramblies.” The “brain scramblies” feels like a low dose of psilocybin, out of time, but without the euphoria and reminder that “all things are interwoven.”

I am all better now, and the animation is coming out in March.

The “brain scramblies” made me feel like a live-wire. I needed to become grounded. Usually I do this through gardening, but the ground outside is frozen.

Lucky for me, a few weeks ago my grandma, Donna, gave me a dutch oven and my mother in-law, Stephanie, gave me some bread-making tips.

I plunged my hands into flour and became a baker of bread.

Like all good beginnings, baking bread begins with primordial goop. Flour and water meet. Microbes eat. A bubbly mass of "sourdough starter” forms.

According to history, the earliest bread was made in or around 8000 BC in the Middle East, specifically Egypt. The quern was the first known grinding tool. Grain was crushed and the bakers produced what we now commonly recognize in its closest form as chapatis (India) or tortillas (Mexico).

The Egyptians were also skilled beer brewers. They paid the slaves who built the pyramids in a thick beverage 1 part food stuff and 1 part alcohol to nourish them and quell rebellion. You can’t plan a revolution if you fall into a drunken slumber after toiling all day. It’s thought that their brewing expertise combined with the warm climate, produced the world’s first sourdough…through their adding wild yeast to the bread mixture. Beer is the best, my favorite is Bell’s Two Hearted in a can.

For my bread I chose to work with 3 flours,
which I got from By The Pound, one of the best places on earth.

King Arthur Organic Unbleached White Flour.

Wheat has three parts to it—the bran which is packed with fiber, the endosperm—the largest part of the seed and made up of mostly starch, and the germ—the nutrient-rich embryo of the seed.

White flour is downright delicious but unfortunately is made up of only the endosperm portion of the wheat, eliminating many of the grain's nutrients.

Because of this loss of nutrients through processing, white flour is enriched to replenish the nutrients in the flour to “match” the nutritional status of the unrefined product.

Interestingly, the richer Romans of 450BC considered whiter bread as higher quality, healthier, and more suited to the educated and wealthy. This is a reminder that through-out historically rich fucks don’t know what they are talking about and should not be called “elites” by our media or anyone else.

Organic “Pumpernickel” Rye Flour

Pumpernickel bread is made using a specific kind of flour called, appropriately enough, pumpernickel flour. This flour is made from coarsely-ground whole rye berries.

The dancing plague of 1518, was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, (modern day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for days. Historical sources agree that this outbreak of dancing began after a single woman started dancing, a group of mostly young women joined in (some allegedly, too their death). The town’s leaders, unable to figure out a solution to the dance epidemic actually set up a stage and brought in musicians to make it a real party.

Scholars believe this event may have been caused by psychedelic food poisoning caused by the toxic and psychoactive chemical products of ergot fungi (ergotism or Saint Anthony’s Fire), which grows commonly on grains (such as rye) used for baking bread.

Ergotamine is the main psychoactive product of ergot fungi; it is structurally related to the drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) and is the substance from which LSD-25 was originally synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938. Hoffman accidentally dosed himself in 1943 and road his bike home in the LSD trance.

This day is now celebrated as “Bicycle Day”.

Organic Whole Wheat Flour

Wheat Flour is good ol’ wheat just as it grew. Bran, endosperm and germ, ground up and packaged for your use.

Whenever I think of wheat, I think of Yuval Noah Harari​’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In it, he asks us to consider the position of wheat 10,000 years ago when it was just one of many wild grasses, confined to a small patch in the Middle East.

"Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?" writes Harari.

His claim is wheat manipulated us. Up until then, humans had lived quite comfortably as hunter-gatherers. Our immediate sibling, Homo erectus had flourished for more than two million years in just this way. By 8000BC, when wheat was domesticated, anatomically modern humans had survived just fine for almost 200,000 years without wheat.

"Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun."

This had profound effects on humanity, not least of which, wheat forced us to stop wandering and to instead settle permanently next to our fields.

Instead of depending on myriad food sources and species, we often got stuck with a single staple such as wheat. It also messed with our bodies. Humans, argues Harari, "adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price."

He points out the word "domesticate" comes from the Latin domus, meaning "house".

"Who's the one living in a house?" asks Harari.

"Not the wheat."

It's us.

Bread-making is a fine art. I am just at the beginning of my practice.

“Everything Bagel Seasoning” is a spice that is nice.

This white loaf came out perfectly.

Look at that gluten matrix.

Delicious. I ate the whole loaf in one sitting.

Still hungry, I tried my hand at Pumpernickel.

It looked cool, but did not rise to the occasion.

The crust seemed ok.

But it was soggy in the middle, it was a failure.

I went back to the basics. Beautiful whole wheat.

I carved into the loaf a symbol of a spiral to remind myself that we all spring out of the same source, infinitely, over time. We are but one node in a giant super organism called everybody else, which is part of an even greater super organism.

If you are really quiet and listen very carefully, the mystery will unravel in your minds eye, don’t forget to remember.

The bread came out great and I was nourished.

See you next week.

-niki

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