Preschool No Knead Bread

Throughout the term it has been fun to watch my daughter's class with their bread starter.  It's been growing right alongside my starter from home and the ones the Bread 101 class have cultivated.  I've overheard several conversations during parent pick-up and drop-off about growing the starter in class, how it's grown with wild yeasts, and when will they get to bake bread. One of the other preschoolers was so excited that my daughter got to take the starter home for the weekend that she requested to do the same.  Another member of the center staff also took some starter home and successfully made sourdough bread.  Hurray!

I think that it's exciting that the preschoolers get an opportunity to experience different types of baking at school and grow a small garden--I hear muffins and berries are particular favorites.  The children have the opportunity to see how they can help make their own food.  This spring, perhaps because of all the baking and talk of baking, my daughter wants to help cook or bake every time I go into the kitchen--and my son often follows.  I've had to think about ways to integrate them into the kitchen (lots of mixing on the counter). I want both of my children to get experience growing food, baking, and cooking.  Some of my fondest memories are of time spent in the garden and kitchen with family and friends.  I've been reading too about the benefits of building other skills such as math skills, reading comprehension, problem solving, cleaning up, and patience.  It's amazing to recognize that an everyday activity has all these skills embedded.  The article Caron Gremont 5 Reasons Kids Belong in the Kitchen particularly resonates with me, and I'm looking forward to trying out some of the other suggestions and recipes in the article.

This spring in one of our Bread 101 units we explored the rise of modernization and industrialization that allowed women to "get out" of the kitchen.  It makes me wonder: what have we lost as a society when children are not baking alongside their parents? It seems that we're lacking community building, skill development, and knowing where our food comes from if we don't spend time in the kitchens with our families.  This term bread has been a powerful medium for exploring wide ranging social and scientific implications of our changing food structures and exploring the impacts here in the Willamette Valley.  I'm looking forward to finding ways beyond this course for my family to continue to garden and bake together and be thoughtful about our food.

Like so many of the bread baking experiences from this term, baking No Knead Bread: Preschool Edition took a couple of tries to get the conditions just right.

I had recommended that on top of the dishwasher was a warm location for getting activity in the fermentation stage.  The helped kids put the bread together and let it rise overnight.

The next morning the dough was extremely, even overly bubbly.

The rising dough was prepared for overnight.  However, the heat must have been too much because rather than rise, it just got crusty and baked on the exterior overnight.  Whoops time to start over.

But, it led me to find this interesting article about temperature control written for the Bread Bakers Guild of America.  There's quite a specific science to determining the perfect temperature for each step in the baking process. There's almost too many variable to take in at once, but the resource looks useful for problem solving a specific problem step at a time.

When a baking project doesn't go well.  It's a perfect time to take a break, problem solve, and work some puzzles with women scientists.

Version 2 had a better time fermenting and rising at room temperature.

It resulted in this beautiful loaf of bread!

When I picked up my daughter at the end of the day, all of the kids and teachers excitedly told me about the bread!  The kids ate it with cream cheese, and my daughter was particularly thrilled to take an extra piece home for snack.  I'm so glad that the kids got to do this project in their class.  Thank you Megan and Carol for making it possible! What a great long term class project with delicious results.