Last week I made a lamb tagine and some flatbreads for dinner. (Side note: Remind me to tell y’all about Family Night some time.) The flatbreads fit with the cuisine - and it’s a good thing, since the ‘Rona-bakers have made sure to snatch up every last packet of yeast in my local grocery store for weeks now.
…but I digress.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of time working with dough. In addition to producing a delicious finished product (I love me some gluten) I enjoy the process - the kneading, the rolling, getting the consistency just so. When I was making my flatbreads, it occurred to me that with every different type of dough I’ve made - bread (leavened and unleavened), pasta, dumpling/potsticker - there is a common step: letting the dough rest.
That’s it. That’s the whole step.
You can’t skip it. (Well, I mean, you could…but then you’d be Doing It Wrong.) You can’t speed it up with some secret ingredient. You can’t “automate” it with some kitchen gadget. I suppose in a sense it’s already perfectly automated; you just roll it into a ball, cover it up, and leave it alone for a while.
There’s something I love about that. In a world that’s decidedly in one big damn hurry - microwave ovens and latency optimizations and high-frequency trading and Amazon deliveries that show up hours after clicking “buy” - I can appreciate that there are still some things that I have to wait on, things that simply take as long as they take.
Many thanks to Arcade Fire for expressing this concept better than I could ever hope to.