In September 1969, Dick and I
began our year on Tucker Lake.
Our cabin had neither road
access nor amenities. This is a
reprint of one of many stories
about our lives during that
special year.
Years ago, my daughter went to Pastry Chef School in San Francisco. One of the arts she learned was bread baking.
She showed me the textbook for her bread baking class. “Chef Peter wrote this. He’s known nationwide for his rustic bread. It’s the latest thing. You use a hot hearth and the bread gets a real crisp crust.”
I looked at the pictures. I read the recipes—“I did all this on Tucker Lake,” I told her. “Chef Peter has nothing on me.”
“Do you know that San Francisco sourdough is unique because it’s the only place in the world where the wild yeast spores in the air have that flavor?” She pressed on with her knowledge.
I countered, “Maybe, but you’ve never tasted sourdough bread made with Tucker Lake yeast starter.” I forced her to listen to my Tucker Lake bread story.
My mother, who had been cooking since the age of 14, knew some old-fashioned baking techniques. Before I left for the wilderness, she gave me a recipe for making flaky light biscuits in an iron skillet. It involved a lot of bacon grease, but the results were delicious.
So I knew that good baking could be done without modern conveniences and recipes. But the actual discovery that bread could be easily baked over a wood fire came as a surprise.
I baked bread frequently in the Coleman oven, but one day Dick had an idea. “Put it in the Dutch oven and set it in the Franklin Fireplace. See what happens. ”
Heat radiated from the red embers glowing in the open fireplace, and I thought, why not? Patting the glistening white dough into a cast iron Dutch oven, I set it on a grate above the hot wood coals and wondered how long it would take for my experimental bread to bake. After 10 minutes I could stand it no more and pulled the Dutch oven out.
I opened the lid to a loaf not quite done and quickly returned it to the grate for another ten minutes. Soon the wonderful smell of baking bread filled the cabin. Another five minutes and a perfect loaf of bread emerged from the oven… golden brown, crisp crust and soft center. We gobbled it down with butter and honey.
So began my bread-baking career on Tucker Lake. I baked it and we ate it. We toasted homemade bread for breakfast and covered thick slices with Billy Boy peanut butter for lunch. We soaked it in pot roast gravy for dinner. I expanded my repertoire to rolls and cinnamon loaves. When people visited, I always served homemade bread for meals, and everyone loved it.
Eventually, I developed my own sourdough starter because it was more convenient than crossing two lakes, two portages and making a forty-mile drive to town to buy yeast.
Inspired by an article in The Mother Earth News,
I saved a little bit of yeast starter sponge and thereafter used it to make sourdough bread. Not only was this more convenient than commercial yeast packets, the results were wonderful. When we left the cabin for the holidays, I brought the sourdough starter along in an empty jam jar to keep it from freezing and kept it alive in my mother’s refrigerator.
Many years have passed and many things have changed, and I occasionally bake bread, but never does it taste as good as the bread baked on the cast iron grate of the Franklin fireplace on Tucker Lake.
I’d still bet my Tucker Lake sourdough against Chef Peter’s San Francisco bread any day.
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