I'd like to say that bread-making is easy like most of the recipes i've blogged about already, but alas, bread is a pain in the ass to make! You have to knead and make sure the water is at the right temperature...blah blah blah. I really feel for all of the housewives during the Middle Ages and other "back in the olden days" time periods when they had to make so much bread with so little resources. Despite being tedious to make and time consuming, there is nothing quite like pulling a warm, crusty, golden loaf of homemade bread that you sweated over in 90° F weather out of the oven and eating it burning hot with butter. Yep, i baked bread in a 500°F oven in 90° weather...I had a craving, alright!!!
* Note: DON'T EVER DO THIS!
I've wanted to make homemade bread for quite some time. Before this instance i'd made a couple of mediocre loaves over the years out of my kid's cookbooks (which are really good btw), such as honey-wheat bread, challah, pizza dough, white bread and sourdough from a kit. But I was really interested in making true artisan bread, the kind that you get at bakeries, the ones that are brown and crusty on the outside and warm, sweet and hole-y on the inside.
I've also had big dreams for my bread-making, which began one day while i was flipping through the food magazine Bon Appetite. One article was about a woman who exchanged her homemade bread with her friends for favors and fancy food items that cost 2x as much as flour and water. I had a dream that I would start a bakery business in my kitchen, winning awards for my breads and gaining the popularity i would never have in high school with my old lady neighbors. The idea of documenting my bread making through social media sparked my interest in creating a food blog. Such great dreams for a humble peasant food.When my mom bought this book for me for my birthday two years ago, I was daunted by the amount of text and scary prep time. The book was the real deal. I mean, this book had recipes for croissants and sticky buns that required overnight fermentation and perfect ratios of butter to flour...etc. Good God! I closed that book so fast and hid it out of site, only to occasonally view it for the gorgeous pictures of flaky biscuits and warm sourdough bread (food porn, people).
It took me two years to actually have the courage to take some action on this idea. I started off peeping into that book by Peter Reinhart again, making his interpretation of Ritz Crackers, which were surprisingly successful. Today, I'm pleased to say that I've successfully made his French bread recipe too...the recipe he states is arguably "the easiest one in the book". aww well, you gotta start somewhere. Its still damn hard though!
Thankfully, its the 21st century and I was blessed with I had the help of my family's handy-dandy Kitchen-Aid, which had the secret weapon of a dough hook! The hook kneaded my dough for me, making it a billion times easier to make the bread. And after wiping the sweat off of my face and eating the bread I made all by myself, I realized that it actually wasn't that hard to make at all if you are patient and have a few tools.
I'll still save the details of how I survived baking the bread for another long post. I can already tell that i've lost some folks in this bread rant, and I could go on and on and on about this topic and i'm not even Peter Reinhart who's written several bread books discussing the chemistry behind bread-making!
Unfortunately, I was too into bread-making to take pictures as I was doing it, so I couldn't give out/explain the recipe. Maybe in another post, if people aren't maxed out on this subject? For now i guess, just enjoy the pretty pictures. :)
Check out Peter Reinharts book, IF YOU DARE!!!
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