bread! bread! bread!

Today, I entered a new culinary terrain: yeast bread making! I rarely bake anything, held back by many obstacles: inability to keep a well stocked baking pantry, avoidance of dealing with the many unlabeled baggies of a few tablespoons of mystery bulk flours, and fear of baking in general - you can't just taste as you go, and there are many points of no return - rising too much, killing yeast, over-baking, etc.

My motivation to get into baking stems from 1) reading about Barbara Kingsolver's Friday night pizza tradition - simple! tasty! throw on whatever's in the fridge! have some wine! and 2) wanting to make bread for Youth Farm this summer.

A friend from school (who cooked for one of the other YF neighborhoods a few years ago) said she used the recipe from Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest as a base and made some improvised bread every day.


I stole the book from my mom, inventoried the flours, and was ready to rock this morning fueled by coffee and this season's best grapefruit. I made a few mistakes due to not carefully reading both the recipe and the illustrated breadmaking guide in the book, but nothing big.

Here's me and the loaf (I already cut off a slice but put in back in the pan for photo purposes,) and me and a slice (I still need to work on even slicing. Straight lines have always been tough for me.)




























It was tasty! Fresh baked bread is so great, even my novice efforts won't to too much of a hardship to eat as I get better with practice.