Loafers

BY DAVID DUER

When I moved to Iowa City in the fall of 1975 to start classes at the University of Iowa, I immediately discovered I could stop by Stone Soup Restaurant at lunchtime, wash dishes for an hour and get paid with a hot lunch. Stone Soup was a cooperative, natural-foods vegetarian restaurant located in the basement of Center East, a square, three-story brick building on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets.

I was drawn to the idealism and activism of the people involved in the food co-op movement. Stone Soup had become a gathering place for vegetarians, artists of all stripes, hippies, nonconformists, feminists and left-wing politicos. One could get a “home-cooked” meal for a couple dollars and stick around to meet and talk with interesting folks (not unlike the vibe at Trumpet Blossom Cafe and Dandy Lion today). As a regular volunteer, I was invited to a staff meeting. They decided to hire a night baking shift; I expressed interest in the job and was hired on the spot. The easiest job application and interview ever.

I did have some baking experience. I started baking bread when I was in high school, often giving away loaves to friends or bringing them to parties. My girlfriend at the time still fondly remembers the loaf I left on her front porch with a romantic note. And when I started hitchhiking, I cultivated the habit of baking bread to thank the people whose home I was crashing at.

Of course, the Stone Soup bakery operated on a larger scale, but it retained that sense of reciprocity. We were baking for not only the restaurant but also New Pioneer Co-op, then located less than a mile away on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Our shift would usually start at 10 p.m., just as the dinner crew was finishing their cleanup, and wrap up at 5 in the morning. The two or three staff on each shift would bake up to 100 one-pound loaves of bread, 10 or 15 pounds of our two types of granola (regular and deluxe), a batch or two of cookies and, on some nights, 10 dozen bean burgers made from a recipe featuring cooked and mashed soybeans.

The core of the bakery staff were hired in short order. We each worked three or four shifts a week. Pat had just blown in from the Santa Cruz Mountains community of Mount Hermon (population 715 hippies, minus one). After her ’67 Dodge Dart ferried her cross-country, its passenger seats were removed so the car could haul baked goods to New Pi as well as 50-pound sacks of whole wheat flour, brown rice and other products from Blooming Prairie Warehouse.

Cheryl grew up in a Mennonite family just south of Iowa City, raised to value practices that support environmental sustainability. Edith, a university student majoring in science and minoring in studio art, had an array of kitchen skills learned from her Italian-American mother. Michael was a jazz clarinetist studying composition in the university’s school of music. Nancy was a native Iowa Citian and an avid organic gardener.

I had a crush on all the women I worked with, and six years later, I married one of them—the woman from Santa Cruz. (Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three other married couples who either worked alongside each other or met at Stone Soup.)

Center East was the former home of St. Mary’s School, which served grades one through 12 from 1893 to 1968. It was sold to the Newman Catholic Student Center in 1975. The Newman Center staff was repurposing the building as a community space. Stone Soup Restaurant rented the cafeteria kitchen and a small adjoining dining room for a nominal fee.

The large basement cafeteria was occasionally transformed into a space for benefit dances for local nonprofits like the Emma Goldman Clinic, Free Medical Clinic, Dum-Dum Daycare Center, Willowwind School or the restaurant itself, featuring the Magic Goat Band, which was mostly composed of New Pioneer and Blooming Prairie Cooperative warehouse staff. Upstairs was the Free Store, where one could address their clothing needs or grab a sweater on an unexpectedly cold day. Clemens Erdahl and Sue Futrell helped set up an office for United Tenants for Action, offering free legal aid to oppose predatory and deadbeat landlords. Barbara Welch, working on a doctorate in Communication Studies, had converted a classroom, with its tall windows and dark woodwork, into the Iowa City Yoga Center.

The restaurant had inherited the school cafeteria’s large gas stoves and acquired a used industrial bread dough mixer. We religiously followed the recipes in The Tassajara Bread Book, written in the late 1960s by Edward Brown, a student at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Retreat tucked away in central California’s Los Padres National Forest. We’d mix lukewarm water, yeast, honey or molasses, milk powder and whole wheat flour, forming a sponge with the consistency of a thick slurry. We’d give it time to rise and then add oil, salt, more flour and other ingredients particular to the bread we were making.

We always made a batch or two of whole wheat and three or four other breads, such as Swedish rye, sunflower seed, challah, oatmeal, poppy seed, cinnamon raisin. At the beginning of the shift, we’d check out the dinner leftovers on the chance they’d inspire us to concoct a new bread recipe. My favorite was “pizza bread,” made by sprinkling a thin layer of marinara sauce and mozzarella over the dough before rolling it into a loaf.

When the dough had risen to twice its size, we would punch it down and begin to pinch off one-pound hunks, using a kitchen scale to measure. Then we’d get to it, loafing on the two long, low countertops that filled the center of the kitchen. It was work that felt like play, work filled with tactile joy. We all developed similar methods for shaping the loaves: kneading the dough, flattening it into a large square to remove any remaining air bubbles while flipping and patting it to smooth its surface, then folding it once, folding in its ends, rolling it into a loaf shape and pinching the seams shut. We’d drop the loaves into seasoned pans strapped together in groups of four and set them atop the warm stove to rise one last time.

As the night wore on, the sensory stimuli would become more robust, helping us power through the wee hours. We’d start pulling steaming bread out of the ovens, removing the brown loaves from the pans and putting them on cooling racks in the dining room. While the loaves were still hot, we’d run a stick of butter over the top crust. Some granola might also be cooling, or peanut butter cookies, perhaps a batch of cinnamon rolls.

Because the restaurant was rarely closed and one could get a meal for working in the kitchen, it drew street people, many of whom were named Rick—Rick the Hobo, Red Rick, Crazy Rick. The bakery’s aromas also attracted attention. My friend Tony, who lived nearby and kept odd hours, might stop in to hang out and share a new poem. The basement kitchen’s windows were at sidewalk-level along the route from the downtown bars to the eastside dorms. In the summer, a few weak box fans would move the heat around, and we often stripped down to the minimal amount of clothing (although we at least kept our aprons on). A lot of foot traffic passed by at 2 a.m. after the bars closed. When the windows were open, we’d hear our share of catcalls. Believe me, we gave as good as we got.

The restaurant had a portable record player and maybe 20 well-worn albums, most of their edges decorated with dried bread dough. Those albums provided the soundtrack to our work—Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses, Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky

After the baking was done and the loaves had been bagged up with their handmade labels, we’d sit down at one of the dining room tables and pull out a runt loaf. We’d slice off thick, hot chunks of bread, slather them with melting butter and enjoy the flavor of our work. We’d talk about the night, or the approaching day, while listening to songs like J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight” or Bonnie Raitt’s “Nothing Seems To Matter.”

After my shift, I’d usually go upstairs to the yoga studio to sleep. Greeted by the lingering scent of incense, I’d lie down on a yoga mat and snooze until someone from the breakfast shift came up to wake me for my 9 a.m. Intro to Philosophy class that fall semester.

I held this job for a full year until I left for Mexico the next fall. When I returned in the spring, the bakery was being relocated and revamped as Morning Glory Bakery. I helped its staff move into two classrooms upstairs, lugging out all but two of the heavy slate blackboards, power-sanding those buckled oak floors down to their light brown grain, removing 75 years of Catholic school memories. In their place, we offered a passionate energy inspired by the aromas and traditions of baking bread.

Born in Akron, Ohio, David Duer has lived in the Iowa City area for 47 years and, most recently, taught English at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. The story above is part of his “Jobs of My Youth” essay series; read more at davidduerblog.com.

RECIPE No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread

By Erin Schroeder

Ingredients

2 cups warm water (around 95 degrees)

1 package of dry instant yeast

1 1/2 tsp Kosher salt

4 cups of flour—wheat or white works!

1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions

In a bowl, mix 2 cups of water with the package of dry instant yeast. Whisk with a fork and let the yeast bloom for 2-3 minutes. The top of your water will look foamy. Mix flour and salt. Stir together and create a well in the middle of the bowl with your fingers. Add the water and yeast mixture. Wet your hand and mix the flour and water. It will be sticky! Mix until combined. If the dough is too dry, add a tablespoon of water at a time until the flour is saturated. If the dough is too wet, add a tablespoon of flour at a time until water is absorbed. Don’t give up on mixing! It starts dry, but it comes together into a shaggy pile of dough. Cover with a tea towel or kitchen towel and let rise for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Remove the towel. You should be able to poke the dough with your finger and watch it deflate a little. Using a rubber spatula, pull the dough in from the sides, working in a rotation, bringing it to the middle. Rotate the bowl until all the dough has been pulled from the sides and folded toward the center. Cover with a towel again and let rise 1.5 to 2 hours.

Once the dough has doubled in size, transfer from the bowl to a lightly floured surface, such as a counter or cutting board. Sprinkle flour on top of the dough, and with your hands, shape into a loaf. Fold the dough under itself several times to form a ball, and pinch the bottom of the loaf along the seam.

Place a six-quart Dutch oven (or heavy cooking pot with an oven-safe lid) in the oven. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees (230 degrees C) with the pot inside. Leave in the oven for a total of one hour.

Place the dough seam-side down in a clean bowl that’s been lightly coated with 1 tbsp of olive oil and dusted with flour. Cover and let rise for 1 hour. You can let the bread rise during the same time the pot is heating in the oven.

When the pot is done heating for 1 hour, remove carefully from the oven and place on a trivet or heat-safe surface. Place dough inside the pot. (Note: Parchment paper works great for this dough if you want to avoid having to wash the pot later!)

Place the pot and dough in the preheated oven with the lid on, and cook for 45 minutes.

Remove the lid after 45 minutes, and continue cooking bread without the lid for another 15 minutes.

Remove bread from the pot, cover and let cool for at least 10 minutes before slicing. Enjoy!