Baking Bread

Bread is delicious.

You disagree? Try some baguette. You will see.


However, bread is also expensive. And the more delicious the bread, like pumpernickel or (as I've already mentioned) baguette, the more expensive the bread. And to be quite honest the store-brand, white-bread (no matter how cheap) just makes me cringe at its lack of flavour... and how unnatural it looks. I mean, white-bread BP&J? Just try and think of something more fake-wholesome looking. I can't. No really, I can't.

So, to save money AND avoid creepy bread, my man-friend and I thought that it might be fun to try baking bread from scratch. Now, despite past disasters with brownies and biscuits, I am actually a decent baker and have been known to make up my own cookie recipes from time to time... and then forget what the hell I did and never be able to make them again. So, it seemed fitting that I would be the one to try my hand at bread.

Four ingredients? (that's it?)
4 cups of flour
1/2 tsp of salt
2 tsps of yeast (which makes the whole house smell like baking - yum!)
1 tsp of sugar

How hard can this be!? Dude, bread is going to be easy!

Quotes that swiftly followed this deceleration:

... when is yeast frothy? How do you know when its frothy?...

... OMG get it off me!...

... wait, I was supposed to add water?...

... OMG get it off me!!...

Oh... I should never be allowed to speak. The baking gods just lie in wait, I swear. They're hiding behind the stove, or under a mixing bowl just waiting for over-confident bakers to say over-confident things. Then they make your furnace room cold so that the warm place you were going to let your dough rise looks like the north pole!

And on that note, some thoughts about baking bread.
It's sticky and it takes a lot more time than you think it will. This is why jobless, medieval housewives baked bread. They were in their houses all day. And I'll bet they invited bread-buddies over, because they needed conversation to occupy the many hours of waiting for the dough to rise.

I know I wish I had a bread-buddy right now... instead I just have Cambridge (yes, I named my laptop). I have been in the kitchen for hours! No really, hours. As I type, I am sitting (wearing my sparkly apron) on my kitchen floor and waiting. Yep, just waiting for my dough to become puffier dough; because apparently under that tea-towel, my dough is rising and breadifying... and then I will have to knead it down and let it rise again... like I'm some sort of bread bully. Then I will put it in a pan and wait for it rise again before I shove the whole thing in an oven and set it on fire!

Hours.

So, as you can imagine,  as I sit, I am reflecting on my experiences with all this bread business and I have come to some conclusions, which I hope others will find helpful.

1) If you start baking by cleaning your kitchen, you'll want to keep that kitchen clean throughout the entire baking process.... this is silly. Don't think this way. I never will again! I say this because as soon as you even look at the flour it puffs onto everything. EVERYTHING. The bowl - puff! Your hair - puff! The floor - PUFF!

It will puff down your shirt and you won't even notice until you are sitting with your laptop, and flour is somehow puffing onto your keyboard. .... I am not speaking from experience or anything.

Damn you flour... why must you go in everything tasty.

2) Keep your cell phone out of the kitchen. When you are making ratatouille, people will laugh your mistakes (again I do not speak from experience, or anything) and, most recently, I've learned that when you are elbow deep in kneading bread and puffed in flour, people will text you. And I don't mean one text, I mean some trilly text-tone will flitter all around you for ten minutes announcing the joyous arrival of your many text messages, until you are ready to either crush that cheerful little bastard of text-tone with your makeshift bread bowl (in my case, a casserole dish) or try to respond to these texts with your nose (again... I do not speak from experience).

3) Never laugh in the face of the baking gods.