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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.
Yeah, and contrary to the advert, the sea monkeys didn’t appear instantly. The eggs were in the ‘water purifier’ sachet. And the packet you added later that supposedly had the eggs in was just blue dye so you could see them.
Rooshie’s not capable of handling anything more complicated than an EZ Bake oven powered by a 60 watt light bulb. Even then, he’d cry when the bulb burned out.
@Lukas Xavier
I love that channel. Primitive Technology is an amazing resource.
@Alan Robershaw – that just horrified me. So, I guess I helped fund a white supremacist when I was 11. Even then I would have been disgusted. Also, my “sea monkeys” aka brine shrimp never even hatched.
Malice W Underland-I tried making sour dough starter, but it didn’t work for me. Do you have any tips? What worked for you?
Kobun37-
.
Thanks for that information. ?It was a real head scratcher for me! I never owned a bread machine before (I bake bread in the oven) and didn’t now much about how they work.
You know what? If anything I think Roosh’s arguments (he’s ridiculous) underscores just how arbitrary notions of masculine or feminine can often be.
For example, I was first taught how to do cross stitch at the age of three years old. At first, it was just yarn a piece of cardboard with holes in it, and a toy plastic needle!!!! But by six, I think I made some very basic pieces.
Now while trying to “reboot” my skills a little (I have an MS), I have been teaching myself computer programing. I like it better than I thought I would. But it’s a lot more like cross stitch and needlework that most people would think.
Even though we think of computers and programming as “masculine” and needle work or cross stitch as feminine.
Considering that my mentor/advisor back in college was pretty obsessed with studying the anthropology of food (I studied anthropology, she is in the Gender Studies department which is closely related to social anthro), she has managed to pass that passion to me somehow.
That being said, food posts are my favorite on this blog and I was wondering if there would be one ever again, and I’m glad to see a new one, so thanks David.
I’m also glad of reading y’all comments, ’cause I’m learning to make bread mostly as a hobby (but also learning new skills for when I start living on my own) and if there’s anything I learned is not to use bread machines… Whatever those things are.
For now all I’ve done is challah bread because I like making Jewish food as a gentile, but my grandmother might pass me down a family recipe that is bread with alcohol, and for some reason she doesn’t want to give it to anyone else. I’ll see how it comes out when the day comes.
Also, I’m a guy. Because I’m obsessed with bread I could not care less what other guys think of me making bread, I’d be a baker for a living if I could, tbh.
My partner – a guy who bears more than a passing resemblance to Roosh (look Roosh isn’t a bad looking guy to my tastes, he’s just vile on the inside) has mentioned several times that when we get settled in shared house he wants to get a bread machine.
I say nothing. I’m not that impressed with bread machine bread and it could be months and months before we’re able to get one.
I’d say something like “It’s much more manly to make bread by hand,” but my partner isn’t led by other people’s concepts of masculinity so I doubt that would work. So I just keep making non-committal ‘mmm’ noises and hope the bread isn’t too awful. But given he’s the guy who frequently forgets to put coffee in the coffee machine, I’m not that hopeful.
My partner is so lovely in so many other ways…
@rugbyyogi
Talk him into getting one that h as s a knead only mode so he can graduate to good bread one day.
I’m surprised, seeings as its Roosh, that he hasn’t made some sort of dough vagina to wank into, I would not touch his bread with a ten foot pole. I bet it’s got extra ingredients like his delicious and godly semen. And he probably thinks that’s the best bit.
Roosh V’s attempts at making bread have managed to drive David to a level of caps lock induced madness that even the most extreme of Capslock induced madness.
Bread baking has become a part of my weekly routine. With some guidance from my husband and his amazing collection of baking books, I’m making good bread on a routine basis. He went to culinary school to retrain after being laid off a little over a decade ago; we still have the sourdough starter he made as part of that. He is more of a pastry chef, so I do all the quotidian baking.
Aleph – that reminded me. When a good friend was being ordained as a UCC minister a while back, she asked me to bake the bread for the service. I made an enormous four braid challah which she was delighted with.
JessicaRed – after becoming accustomed to baking using metric measurements, it occurs to me that that would be a good way to introduce children to it. Once they get used to grams and liters, ounces and cups will seem cumbersome and counterintuitive.
No need to spend money on a bread machine. No need to put a lot of effort into mixing and kneading.
No knead bread is now all the rage.
This guy is a good start, but there are heaps of others.
@ Robert, I wonder what the service looked like, as I’m used to seeing the bread loaves we’re more used to, or huge crackers at times.
Aleph – I can’t really describe it, except that it was as high church as the UCC gets. My religious upbringing was Roman Catholic, so I didn’t have a frame of reference. She was wearing a decorated robe-like garment, but there were no bells or incense.
@kupo – good tip! But wouldn’t we be better off with one of those fancy mixers? Wouldn’t that do the same?
Hmmm – maybe that’s what we should register for for our wedding – contributions to one of those ridiculous high end mixers.
Bread machine fantasies aside – he’s the kinda guy who will clean out the mixer or food processor, equipment I’ve avoided buying because I hate cleaning them out.
Given what Roosh has told us about his reluctance to tend to basic personal hygiene without an ulterior motive (ie he hopes to get laid), I would not want to touch his bread whatever it looked like.
And here all this time I thought I was a woman, but it seems I’m actually a hyper-masculine pickup artist, what with my tendencies for bread-making and all.
@rugbyyogi
Yeah, I definitely recommend a stand mixer. It’s more than a 1 trick pony. I use mine all the time. I was only suggesting the bread machine option since it sounded like he was set on the idea of one.
Roosh should make all of us sandwiches.