Kaelren's First Loaf (and why he always burns it)

Dispatches from the Archive · No. 4

The new Book One opens with a burnt loaf of bread:

Kaelren had buried forty-one squads, and he still burned the first loaf.

People keep asking me about that line, so here's the story behind it, and the recipe.

Why bread?

Kaelren is a soldier who doesn't age. He's outlived everyone he has ever served with. I needed something he does every week that says more about him than any speech could. Bread was it. You can't rush it, you have to come back to it, and it's for other people. A man who has buried forty-one squads still gets up before dawn to feed the forty-second.

The first loaf burns because it always sits too close to the hot corner of the oven, the one where the bricks cracked in a winter nobody remembers. He keeps it anyway. In Emberhold, a burnt loaf kept is love. Mareth, the old healer, claims the bottoms.

And there's a line he folds the dough by, one he learned from someone a very long time ago:

Fold it. Like you're tucking in a child.

Who taught him that is one of the questions the book is built around.

The recipe (a real one)

Emberhold bread is a dark, seeded country loaf. This version works in an ordinary oven.

You need

• 500 g bread flour (swap 100 g for wholemeal if you like it darker)
• 10 g salt
• 7 g dried yeast (or 150 g active sourdough starter, if you keep one; that's the "old dough from last week")
• 1 tbsp black sesame or nigella seeds (Emberhold's "black seed")
• 350 ml water, warm as blood (just warm to the touch)

Method

1. Mix the flour, salt, yeast and seeds. Add the water and stir until there's no dry flour.
2. Rest it 30 minutes.
3. Fold, don't knead. Wet your hand, lift one side of the dough, fold it over the middle, turn the bowl and repeat four times. Do this every 30 minutes, three or four times. Gently, like you're tucking in a child.
4. Cover and leave it until it's doubled (1–2 hours, longer in a cold kitchen).
5. Shape it into a round, put it on floured baking paper, and let it rise again for 45 minutes.
6. Heat the oven to 230°C with a tray or Dutch oven inside. Slash the top, bake 20 minutes covered (or with a tray of water underneath), then 20 to 25 minutes uncovered until it sounds hollow when you knock on the bottom.
7. Burn the first one if you have to. Keep it anyway.

Read where it starts

Chapter One of The Shattered Gate is free on the site. That's where the loaf comes out of the oven, and where the Gate, dark for 109 years, looks back.

Read Chapter One →

If you bake it, send me a photo. I'd love to see Emberhold bread in real kitchens.

John