I made yeast bread for the first time this weekend. Well minus the brief time we owned a bread maker, which is a fairly unsatisfying experience when it comes to bread. I’ve made plenty of quick breads but for some reason I’d never baked real bread from scratch. Which is strange given my lust for bread. I am a serious bread addict. It’s my downfall when trying any low carb diet. I could live on bread and cheese for a lifetime and never grow bored. But why I’ve never made it comes down to two reasons.
First, as a true San Francisco Bay Area native, sourdough is my #1 bread choice. So much so that every year of the past 15 years I’ve lived in New England I’ve thought about getting a mail order subscription of it from San Francisco, but I’ve encountered enough passable versions to make do. Anyway, while I have dreams of having my own sourdough starter frankly it’s just too much effort. And I can’t get past believing, as I once told, that true sourdough can only come from the airborne yeast of SF’s magic fog. I like believing that. In my love-hate relationship with my home it’s one of the few things about it that makes it really seem magical to me. So I’m leaving the sourdough to the experts. And making another kind of bread just didn’t have quite enough of a draw.
Second, my entire life my mother has spent all of Christmas Eve day and night making Stolen. Endless kneading and rising (under the electric blanket in her bed) that goes well into the next morning because she never leaves herself enough time and always makes a dozen loaves even though she and my grandmother were the only ones who ate it. It always seemed like a crazy amount of effort to me for something so icky. Yes icky is the best word I can come up for my mother’s Stolen. What a waste of bread and icing. Filled with raisins, my nemesis, and scary neon colored candied fruit that sits in a plastic container in syrup in our cupboard or my grandmother’s pantry all year long. At some point the candied fruit became hard to find so they stocked up on it. I’m guessing it became hard to find because it was found to be a carcinogen or made people glow alien light. So every time I think of making bread I think of the hours and hours of labor spent on something I despised.
But I’m me. A bread addict. Someone who loves to bake. So at some point I had to start making bread. This first effort went well. Easy. No hours of labor. No mishaps. That happy bread baking smell and a pretty brown loaf at the end. It was a very basic recipe out of a vegetarian cookbook I have and didn’t end up tasting like much of anything so it’s not really worth sharing. Not bad at all just very very plain. But it’s a start. A start of something wonderful I’m sure. In my future I see much more bread, lots of pizza dough, some Biga at least to try to get a little of that sour flavor, and maybe… just maybe… a sourdough starter of my very own.
October 08, 2009, 11:16am Comments
