Take thee this daily bread

I am excited to announce a new chapter in my life.  I am going to start making homemade bread instead of buying lame store bought bread.  There is a slew of advice out there on bread making, and the number one tenant that I have adopted is, “don’t get disheartened.”  Apparently there are many tricks to bread making and each one is learned the hard way.  Once you have one type of loaf down pat, the next one comes along and turns out rock hard.  At least that is the impression I get.  As for me, I have just begun my journey with 100% whole wheat bread.

My first loaf of bread was not quite what my mom terms “duck killing bread,” and despite it “having crust harder than French bread” the flavor is light and delicious.  I had the oven too hot though and it did not rise before the crust hardened.  On the edges in the middle you could see where the bread tried to break free of its dark crusty prison; there was what honestly resembled tear marks down the sides of the loaf.  Alas, the insides were forced to finish baking into a dense block.  As I said before, the bread does not quite qualify as “duck killing” and is still quite edible.  We have already polished off half the loaf.

Just as a side not, my mom does actually describe dense bread loaves as “duck killing bread” per the Hugh Grant movie About a Boy.  The scene unfolds with him sitting by a pond in the city with a loaf of the fated bread.  In a fit of pent up emotion, he chucks the entire hunk of bread into the water and hits a duck, which then goes flippers up.  Hence the phrase “duck killing bread.”

Learning how to make bread requires some failure.  I had gathered that from listening to people talk about it and now I understand the inevitability of some amount of failure before quality breads are consistently produced.  I still have to shed a silent tear since my screw up did not occur until the very last step.  If only I had listened to my past experience with our finicky oven and kept the temperature dial lower than that long mark we suspect is 350, then I may have produced a successful whole wheat bread loaf.  I am particularly chagrined because I used almost all the honey that we sneaked from Starbucks in that recipe.

Honey from Starbucks is one of our little ways of dodging outrageous prices.  A honey bear runs about $8 to $9 dollars here.  I do not even look at the price for good honey.  Chris and I find ourselves at Starbucks about once every other week and spend $5 to $7 on café mistos and thus deem it justified including eight to ten packets of honey in our purchase.  I can usually make those last for quite a while, consuming an average of one honey packet every two days.  I splurged with my honey budget making that bread yesterday.  I used SEVEN honey packets and so now I only have three left.  I am afraid that for my next loaf I am going to have to use sugar instead of honey.  A true sadness because I prefer honey to sugar in almost anything, but I cannot justify a $7 honey bear when part of the reason for making bread in the first place is to save the $4 it costs to buy it.  That is, of course, just the financial justification.  My main reasons are that I want to learn how to bake bread because I enjoy doing it and homemade bread is healthier than store bought bread.  Most commercial breads are full of ingredients added for the sole purpose of preserving the bread so that it can be packaged and shipped and set out on shelves for days without molding or going stale.  The ingredients for homemade bread have a truly beautiful simplicity:  Flour, salt, yeast, sugar (or honey or molasses) and sometimes milk.  Of course there are some breads with cracked wheat, wheat gluten, rolled oats, sprouted grains, and other variations and additions, but they all have the wonderful commonality of lacking gross amounts of preservatives.  I sleep better at night knowing that my bread does not have high fructose corn syrup listed in the ingredients.  Okay, so the real reason I slept so well last night probably has something to do with being awake at 4:30 am and putting in a full day.  So I guess I’ll say I simply enjoy my bread far more when it is fresh out of the oven, even if it’s a little dense with a crunchy crust.

Since writing the last I have started my second loaf of bread.  I hadn’t even gotten to the first rise before messing this one up.  I thoughtlessly added more water than I should have – about four times more water.  I was supposed to dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup warm water and instead dissolved it in 1 cup of water.  I did not realize my mistake until after I added it to the flour/milk mixture.  So I had to make the choice: throw away the dough or add more flour/salt/yeast to make up for the liquid.  I chose to add more flour and finish the process.  So the dough is on its second rise now and by all appearances has the potential to be a fine work of bread.  Of course I am well aware that the potential for disaster lies in the slightly wonky proportions of flour, liquid and yeast.  I will let you know how it turns out – keep your fingers crossed for me!

The first loaf is out of the oven and beautifully risen, though sadly a bit doughy.  Considering I almost washed my hands of the whole affair after adding too much water initially.  The second loaf is now cooking and I will be sure to leave this one in a little longer and maybe turn up the heat juuuust a scosh so that is bakes all the way through without hardening the crust too rapidly.  Okay, maybe I will just bake it a wee bit longer.  Our oven is finicky and now that I have it at a workable temperature, I am a bit shy of messing with it.  I would rather not revert to old mistakes when I have a viable option that I have not yet explored.  I am in no hurry so I’m not at all shy of baking it a bit longer.  Now I just have to be sure not to fall asleep before 9:30 so that my ugly duckling dough doesn’t blossom only to be turned to cinder.