Communion Bread
I won’t knock communion wafers. If that’s your jam, rock on. But when I feast on the body of Christ, I want something that tastes like… Joy. Not… Meh.
We bake our own communion bread at our church. I inherited the recipe from my home church back in Chicago.
To give you an idea of how good it is, I’ll confess… For years, we’ve occasionally packed a loaf into Rory’s school lunch. She’ll sit there at snack time, and while her friends are ripping into their Gogurt packs, she’s digging into a piece of communion bread1 (yes, total pastor’s kid move). Sometimes, she’ll opt for a warm piece of it on Saturday mornings over pancakes.
We make it together, Rory and I. It’s been our ritual for years since I got the recipe. Here’s an old timelapse of us I made for one of my seminary classes:)
Part of the communion bread-making liturgy is music. Our go-to is the one and only Audrey Assad, particularly this album…
Or this playlist…
I don’t know if your church is open to baking your own, but for what it’s worth, I wanted to share the recipe here for you. Or maybe you just want a delicious snack for you and/or our kiddo to balance the Doritos and Goldfish like us. Either way, you can go as solemn in this liturgy or as light as you’d like.
Ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups bread flour
3 tsp. baking powder
¾ cup molasses and
¼ cup honey
½ cup milk
½ cup cold water
¼ cup canola or vegetable oil
¼ tsp. salt
Method
Preheat oven to 400° F.
Spray baking sheet with cooking spray or use parchment paper.
Sift together dry ingredients in a large bowl and set aside.
Combine honey, molasses, milk, water, oil, and salt and mix well.
Add wet ingredients to the flour mixture and mix until combined (it helps to have two people here - one to pour and one to stir). Be careful not to overmix. The dough will be quite wet and sticky.
Pull off a baseball-size lump of dough and knead in flour so it’s not so sticky. Plop that bad boy down on a floured surface and roll it until it’s about 1/2 inch thick. (You can sprinkle a little more flour on top for aesthetics.)
Do this with the whole batch. ☝️
Score top of each with a cross, slather a little olive oil on top, and bake in batches for about 7-8 minutes. Bread may appear undercooked.
Remove from sheet immediately and place on a wire rack to cool.
Freeze what you don’t use.
Don’t worry, purists… It’s not consecrated:)