Baking Communion Bread

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            Growing up, my Mom was Presbyterian and my Dad was Jewish. That meant that when I was little, we would celebrate Shabbat in our home. Dad would go to a bakery and get an enormous loaf of challah – a braided egg bread. After a few years, someone got my mother a bread machine. My brother and I decided that we would find a recipe and bake our own special bread. We let the machine prepare the dough, but we took it out before the baking cycle so that we could roll the dough into three long snakes, braid it ourselves, and pop it into the oven. The tantalizing scent of that bread baking curled through the house and whet our appetites for our Friday supper. When I went away to college, I lost my weekly bread making tradition and I stopped going to church.

After five or six years, the church started calling me to come back, to seek God more earnestly. I went on a mission trip to New Orleans and I heard that a woman from our host church baked the communion bread every time. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that someone could actually bake bread, non-professionally for a church. So, I asked my pastor if he would let me bake the communion bread – if the challah of my childhood would be okay to make. He said that sounded great so I found a new job in the church.

            I found the old recipe, I found videos online, I listened to the ever sage, ever hilarious advice of Alton Brown. Doing the same recipe over and over again led to certain adjustments and refinements – using boiling water for steam heat during the rising stage, preparing and baking the dough at church so it was fresh from the oven, learning a six-strand rather than a three-strand braid. Every Sunday that we had communion, the sweet smell of bread filled the halls of the building and you could hear people come in the church doors, take a big ‘ol whiff of the air, and say, “are we having communion today?” Suddenly in our little North Carolina church, communion became something different for all of us. We anticipated it, we missed it on Sundays when we didn’t have it. People (myself included) came up to the Table salivating for that warm, filling, holy food. After the service, many of the congregants would swarm the kitchen to grab extra helpings.


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