Before Christmas, I taught a couple of bread making classes at the new Cuisine Gourmet store on Monkland Avenue, in N.D.G. They were small groups: 4-5 kids at a time. We sat at the low kid-sized table to weigh our ingredients, mix, knead, and eventually eat our bread. I think the kids dug it. In fact, they usually wanted to share the fruits of their labour with the customers wandering through the store. They even helped with the clean up. Sure, it’s not hardcore fancy baking but you know what I realized? … The actual bread recipes don’t matter. What’s important is the process itself and all that comes out of that. The little curious, hyper kid gets a chance to sit with a “real live” baker in his impressive chef’s whites and gets careful answers to all his questions, no matter how “unrelated” (“How tall do you have to be to be a baker? Does dough taste good raw? Will I get big muscles from kneading the dough?”). The shy, klutzy seven-year-old gets to make a mess with the flour and water and gets told that it’s all good and that, actually, it’s a necessary part of the process so she shouldn’t feel bad.
Some of the bread we made looked amazing and some looked a little scary, but boy were those kids proud of what they’d done! I swear some of them even looked a little taller when they left.
