No Whey, José!

A few weeks ago I got the urge to start baking homemade bread. Josh and I go through bread really fast since we eat sandwiches for lunch every day and usually a loaf of crusty bread for dinners through the week. I thought it would be really nice to make the bread ourselves, that way we know exactly what’s going into it. I’d much rather have bread with 4 ingredients in it than the store bought bread with a list of 50 ingredients for a simple sandwich bread.

Some people (like my dad for example) get really intimidated by anything that has to do with yeast. Well actually my dad gets intimidated by baking in general. But I guess that’s one thing he didn’t pass along to me, because I happen to really like the whole kneading and rising and all that stuff that goes into making yeast bread. It’s almost like you’re tapping into this ancient ritual of making food that our ancestors have been doing since forever. It’s a long process but it gives you an excuse to be alone in your thoughts and know that you’re creating something so yummy out of flour, yeast, and water. Genius if you ask me.

I started by making a batch of country white bread from the new bread cookbook I bought. While it was rising I got a little bored waiting around for it so I started a batch of my Aunt Toni’s Oatmeal Bread, which I ended up giving my mom for Mother’s Day. I love that bread because it’s a hearty white-ish bread but it’s just slightly sweet and goes great with pretty much everything. After my grandma learned that we were so into baking bread, she was super nice and gave us her bread machine. Now while there’s not much connection with ancient artisan breadmakers of the past while you push a button and let the machine do it’s job, it’s great because you can still have fresh, homemade bread even if you don’t have a day to set aside to make it by hand. So we would put all the ingredients in the machine at night before bed and in the morning we would have fresh yummy homemade bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

My favorite bread in the whole world is sourdough bread, so the thing that actually sparked all of this bread making was me creating a sourdough starter. I fed and cared for that thing like a little jarred baby for over a week. I even took it to my parent’s house one weekend and everyone looked at me cross-eyed while I lovingly poured flour and water into a glass jar and placed it on the refrigerator every 24 hours. I did this for over a week until I left it in the oven and accidently baked it. But I don’t think it was working anyway so I guess I’ll just have to start again. Until then, I’ll just have to stick with boring old bread like this basil and garlic focaccia bread we made the other day. Life is tough.