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By David Futrelle
Let’s say you’re a blogger and YouTube dude who loves bread, and who has recently gotten all excited about baking bread at home with the help of a cheap bread machine. So excited, in fact, that you can’t wait to show off your new baking prowess to the world.
Let’s say that you’re also deeply insecure about your masculinity and terrified that if you confess to the sin of … baking, all your fans will turn on you and denounce you as some sort of girly wuss because BAKING IS FOR GIRLS.
What on earth do you do?
Well, if your name is Roosh Valizadeh, you make a video proclaiming that yes, you love baking bread but only because baking is a highly scientific endeavor that’s not girly or wussy at all.
I missed Roosh’s video when he first put it out nearly two years ago. But it’s been making the rounds on Twitter again and so I thought you all might appreciate Roosh’s extremely manly take on the Unbearable Dudeness of Bread Making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gmPlpQYgxI
In case you don’t have the patience to sit through the entire 18 minutes, here’s the gist of it:
Roosh begins his video by announcing, with a mixture of bravado and cowardice, that he likes to bake bread, a fact you might think his viewers would have already gathered from the title of his video “How I make my own bread at home with a bread machine.”
But apparently this is a bit of a sensitive subject for Roosh. “Yes I am outing myself as a baker, as someone who likes to cook” he declares.
I’m not a woman. I am ultra-masculine, as you can see. But baking and cooking in general is a scientific thing and men like scientific things.
ROOSH NOT WOMAN, BREAD IS SCIENCE!
I used to be a a scientist and baking my own bread which I’m going to show you how is one of the most joyful things that I can do at home.
NO, NO, GUYS i’M NOT A SISSY GIRLY COOK, I AM A MANLY BREAD SCIENTIST, A SCIENTIST OF BREAD!
After babbling on for a bit about how store-bought bread is too expensive and filled with chemicals and boy oh boy does he love the smell of freshly baked bread and having his own bread machine has “completely changed” his life, Roosh demonstrates his baking process. Which consists of putting a bunch of ingredients in his bread maker and turning it on. There’s no dough-kneading or anything like that. He’s less of a baker than a pourer of bread ingredients into a machine.
But he narrates the whole process in detail, I guess to help out those who are somehow incapable of reading a list of ingredients. It gets a little weird.
The first step is I add two spoons, two spoons of olive oil and the oil keeps it moist, it really slows down the staleness process and also gives it a richer taste. I then add 330 milliliters of lukewarm water and water obviously you need water for bread and I heat it just for a minute on the stovetop to ensure that it is warm but if you have a microwave you can do it that way to make sure it’s not too hot because then you’re gonna kill the yeast.
Thanks, dude, I don’t think I could have figured out how to heat water up a little bit without your helpful assistance!
Next up we got to feed the yeast, and if you don’t know yeast is the organism that creates the holes in the bread, makes it light and but they need food and the food for yeast is is sugar, so I put 18 grams total of sugar.
And then of course the most important ingredient is the flour. I put 500 grams and as you can see I’m weighing everything so if I make a good batch of bread I really want to be able to duplicate it so when you weigh it you get the most precise measuring possible so that you can easily duplicate anything.
Er, isn’t that what recipes are for? We humans have been baking bread for nearly 15,000 years — bread actually predates agriculture by several thousand years. I mean, I think we’ve kind of got this bread thing figured out. No need for Bread Scientist Roosh to do any elaborate experiments on this front.
Anyway, Roosh goes on to add yeast and salt, as one does, and then lets the machine work its magic.
But evidently he hasn’t quite got the Bread Science quite right yet because this is the result:
Now I’m not the winner of the Nobel Prize for bread or anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what a loaf of bread is supposed to look like. The top is not supposed to be concave, and also shouldn’t it be a little bit darker, like the rest of the crust? This is just … wrong.
HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT A BREAD MACHINE CHANGED YOUR LIFE WHEN THE BREAD YOU MAKE WITH IT LOOKS LIKE THIS SHIT?
Roosh, to his credit, realizes that there is something a little bit off with his loaf.
You see there is a problem — my bread it cratered a bit, so the middle came down, and from the research I’ve been doing online it’s either because there’s too much water or too much yeast so for the next loaf I decided to lower the amount to three grams instead of 4.5.
Here is the new, more scientifically advanced loaf:
DUDE THAT IS STILL NOT RIGHT
Now the top is, it’s flat but I still want that rounded top so I’m probably gonna even lower the yeast a little bit more but this is the fun of baking.
THAT IS NOT THE FUN OF BAKING
It’s science so you change one thing each time and see what the result is this is very similar to when I used to work as a scientist at two biotech firms I would actually make food for microbial and mammalian cells and I would change one thing to see the effects of the food how the yeast would actually grow because I grew these cells and this is almost the exact same thing except I can eat the product after that
IT IS NOT ALMOST THE EXACT SAME THING, YOU ARE MAKING FOOD FOR HUMANS NOT FOR MICROBES
and so as you can see my excitement for growing bread is really high
DUDE DID YOU JUST SAY “GROWING BREAD,” WHY DID YOU SAY GROWING BREAD, BREAD IS NOT GROWN, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE, ARE YOU A SPACE ALIEN OH GOD THAT WOULD EXPLAIN SO MUCH
because it’s just, it’s cool, it’s a good way to also challenge myself. I mean it’s not a big challenge but, can I make a good loaf?
NO YOU CANNOT MAKE A GOOD LOAF, YOU HAVE PROVIDED PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE THAT YOUR LOAVES ARE NOT GOOD.
You know, can I take a basic recipe and tweak it so that it turns out great and the people who have been eating the bread I make they say it tastes great
WHO ARE THESE ALLEGED PEOPLE, PLEASE PROVIDE PROOF OF THEIR EXISTENCE, OH GOD YOU PROBABLY CAN’T, YOU PROBABLY ATE TEHM, YOU PROBABLY KILLED THEM AND THREW THEM INTO A GIANT YEAST KIT IN YOUR BASEMENT, IS THE NAME OF YOUR COOKBOOK BY ANY CHANCE “TO SERVE MAN?”
Weirdly, as gross as Roosh is, and as badly as his loaves turned out, I find myself wondering if maybe I should get a bread machine for myself. I mean, I love bread, and I certainly couldn’t do a worse job making it than Roosh has here.
This reminds me of the time an ex insisted he was making “manly sweet muffins” for a bake sale.
They were cupcakes
Apparently its unmasculine to call them cupcakes.
You’d think someone that insecure about the word “cupcakes” wou”d also find “muffins” insufficiently macho. Then again he did need to emphasize they were manly muffins.
Hubby and I have owned several bread machines over the years. We make bread several times a week. I can’t remember the last time I bought bread at the supermarket.
Our current machine is a Panasonic and is by far the most reliable one we’ve had. I put it down to it warming up the ingredients before it starts mixing.
I still laugh about it much to his horror
I mean manly sweet muffins really?
There’s no shame in baking delicious food that I ate a good portion of after
@kupo, Thanks for the offer. I’ve found lots of interesting bread recipes over the years. I just….don’t have the energy to actually make it. Don’t have the energy for much of anything the last few years. Don’t know why, but there it is. I have lots of grand plans for wonderful things to bake & cook and none of it ever happens because…energy.
@Malice I tried with sourdough several times – back when I had energy. I managed to kill several starters and never really did get a good sourdough bread out of any of them. I think we’re just too far north for good natural yeasts or keeping it alive. I looked into a dry sourdough starter at one point instead of a more liquid one, but never got around to doing it.
@Z&T My parents had one of those carving knives. Although it came out on Sundays too for the Sunday roast. I got one for myself, but it freaked me out too much & I (my husband refused to touch it) only used it for a couple years of turkeys before just switching to a good knife and/or picking them apart.
Also, Craiglist or Kijiji might have a good stand mixer.
The one I really want is way out of most people’s price league though, so I bet it’s not likely to ever show up any of those places. http://www.avivahealth.com/shop/products.asp?itemid=11373
A great opportunity to dazzle his viewership with his knowledge of anaerobic metabolism, and that’s what he goes with? Wow. Much knowledge. Such science.
Can’t he bake his bread without trying to assure the world he’s totally a man, you guys, or does the yeast he uses feed on insecurity?
@Catalpa
I’m pretty sure he was chopping off the end crusts, so he could… reach the inner part without the crust being a bother. If he was holding it by the other end (assuming a rectangular loaf), he might not cause crumbs either. Then the loaves would be sliced before being handed out to the inmates, so they couldn’t prove that there was a chasm in the middle.
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Roosh, was that you?
I wonder if this was inspired by Achewood’s “Badass Games,” arc, in which one of the events was baking bread, on the logic that only a true badass can bake his own staff of life from scratch.
On the subject of homemade bread, I’d just like to say that English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David is probably the most comprehensive book on breadmaking I have ever read. Not only does it contain recipies for every traditional British baked good one can imagine, but Elizabeth also goes into extraordinary detail on every facet of bread making from yeast storage to the variety of historic ovens. It’s a marvelous read.
As for Roosh, everything he does is like the fragile masculinity equivalent of “no homo” in that he absolutly must reaffirm that he’s no chick or into chick stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if he utters “I’m a man” before vacuuming or doing the laundry.
Moon Custafer:
You can make anything more manly just by sticking the adjective “tactical” in front. Tactical muffins. With some manly science experimenting with food colouring, you could probably give them a camo pattern too, for extra manosity.
@silly-bollocks
Oh, as if he ever does either.
Cooking, while generally coded as a feminine activity, is a minefield of complex sexist assumptions. Cooking at home is seen as woman’s work, for example, but pro chefs are super macho. Baking is often seen as more effeminate than other forms of cooking (it’s all sweet and delicate, yeah?). However, there does tend to be a rustic, manly association to baking bread that is distinct from baking cakes and pastries. Just look at the Great British Bake Off where bread is strictly the preserve of manly posturing judge Paul Hollywood.
All this of course is spectacularly nonsensical as being able to cook in any style and method is clearly both a fun hobby with tangible tasty rewards and an obviously desirable trait in a potential partner. If Roosh dropped writing rape manuals and took up recipe books and baking instead (preferably not just pouring ingredients into a machine that does all the work) then maybe women wouldn’t find him as repulsive.
In Britain when I was a kid what we now tend to call cupcakes used to be called fairy cakes (presumably cupcakes was always the American term and just became more popular over here as a result), so for British people “cupcake” is already the No Homo name.
Also, a muffin is a different thing from a cupcake. You can’t use the term interchangeably. The process of making the batter is different (cakes need a smooth, velvety batter that involves creaming sugar and fat together, then adding eggs, then dry ingredients, muffins are made by separately mixing dry and wet ingredients and then just mixing them all together in a much rougher batter, often with fewer eggs), meaning that the end product is a different texture. A muffin is denser and a cake (including cupcakes) lighter and softer.
My mother used to say that she liked making bread, because kneading the dough got her hands really clean. I think she was joking.
I’m going to delurk after years of lurking.
As a food scientist, I resent this remark.
That said, Roosh’s understanding of food science seems to be so basic an 18 year old, first year food science student could run circles around him. And that student would probably be a woman, because most food scientists are women.
No, that’s something I enjoy while kneading. Not that I go into kneading dough with dirty hands, I should stress, but because the nature of the process is that at first the wet dough sticks all over your hands but as you knead and the gluten bonds form stronger and stronger the dough sticks to itself and the stuff that was stuck to your hands starts to bond with your ball of dough instead, thereby cleaning your hands.
My dad makes his own bread with the bread maker (he has done for years and has never refered to himself as a baker or bread scientist btw), I can confirm that is not what bread from a machine is supposed to look like.
Dad likes to experiment too, some come out better than others but the bread maker comes with instructions on what works best with the machine he can base it on so nothing gets too messed up.
Let me guess… Roosh is too “manly” to read the instructions or look up tutorial videos right?
@Moggie
Fairy cakes honestly sounds more awesome in my mindset.
As for the muffin and cupcake difference I think he couldn’t think if a manlier word so he went for a similar looking product . He shouldve gone for “Sugar grenades” or “Sprinkle Tactical nukes”
You also forgot muffins are inferior to cupcakes if you adore sweets lol.
Maybe he should have just made some actual muffins and be spared the embarrassment of failed masculinising inaccurate terminology.
And, yes, there’s also the fact that muffins are invariably less sweet, don’t tend to come with frosting, are sometimes actually savoury and are occasionally English muffins, a whole different product that even here in England tends to be given the prefix “English” as regular American muffins are much more commonplace.
Oh, now I am confused. You see, I (a woman…an older woman, at that ) bake bread, but – and I am horrified to have to admit this – I do not (gasp) HAVE a bread machine. I (sob) make my bread the old fashioned way. I use muscle (kneading the dough), reading skills (using a recipe), and carefully chosen, organic ingredients. After hours of shopping, mixing, kneading, setting aside to rise, punching down and kneading again and, finally, putting the dough in a well-greased bread pan and baking it, I then have a fragrant, warm, delicious loaf or several to share with family and friends…often with butter, preserves and other goodies.
And, dearie me, I also am not in possession of what appears to be the requisite beard that all true and masculine cooks and bakers seem to need.
So, what am I doing wrong? Where have I failed? Oh, Roosh, great godling of baked goods – how can I atone for my obvious sin? Am I too feminine, what with my kneading muscles and such? Please educate me about the superiority of your masculine bread making. Perhaps it is the sciency part of using a machine to do all the work that my poor female brain just does not get.
Roosh-douche, dude, bread making, like the overwhelming majority of other activities in which we participate, is neither masculine nor feminine…no matter how you do it. It is human. In fact, cooking and baking are among the most ancient of HUMAN activities, followed immediately by the sharing of food, thereby building communities and civilizations.
Oh, and no insult was intended to folk who use bread machines. ‘Tis not the method of the making, rather the joy and the yumminess of the eating and sharing that matters. Splendid appetite to all who partake, and may all of our loaves feed the heart as well as the tummy.
I love my KitchenAid and my copy of Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Breads cookbook. Now THERE was a bread scientist.
I love my bread machine. I don’t have a real oven or space for one, so it’s this or schlepping to the store that has bread I can actually eat. The shape isn’t quite “right” but the top is round. We got some flat topped ones when perfecting our adaptation of the recipe but since then they’re all fine, just no muffin top from the bread expanding over the edge of the pan.
Manly bread scientists need to be at job fairs spruiking manly bread science.
*sigh* I miss that taste of homemade bread. Alas, too many carbs. 🙁
@TB Tabby
Hey, I got that reference!