The Process of Baking Bread and Building a Relationship

Today, I helped a student use baking bread as an analogy for forming and maintaining relationships, and it went remarkably well.

The recipe she found started us off with sugar, yeast, and warm water. The sugar and warm water could represent the warmth of friendship and the sweetness you might expect from a dating couple or newlyweds. The yeast was harder to place, but we decided that, since it would have to be active yeast, it could represent activities like dating and courtship.

The recipe then called for salt, which represented emotion. Strong emotions, especially sadness and happiness, can lead to the shedding of salty tears. The recipe also called for oil, but we couldn't think of how to use oil in the analogy, so we might skip that part.

One especially tricky but essential ingredient was the flour. I knew we needed flour, but I had a hard time thinking of what flour could represent in a relationship. We determined that, if the flour is "whole grain," it could represent being open and honest enough to show our partners our "whole selves," not just the parts we show off on social media.

The dough needing time to rise easily represented the time relationships take to develop, and the yeast became useful again in this later part of the baking process. This time, the yeast represents hardships, including the mere passage of time. Hardships can eat up the sweetness in a relationship and, if I'm right about what makes sourdough sour, potentially sour a relationship. That's why it's so important to work through our relationships, like kneading the bread.

Relationships take a good deal of time and effort to form and maintain, just like bread does. There are a handful of gaps and stretches, but mostly, it's a fairly decent analogy. I'm glad my student had that idea and shared it with me so we could develop it together.