The beginning...

The beginning is usually a good place to start...

A few months ago I woke up early on a Sunday morning and decided to make a loaf of bread. For the most part I would say it just came out of nowhere, but the first glimmer of the idea occurred several years ago after watching a cooking demonstration. For the demo the chef made some of "Granny's Bread". For me there was quite a revelation in that it only had 4 ingredients....flour, water, salt and yeast. I am not sure why, but I had always figured there was more to it than that. Of course my experience up to that point with baking was with boxed cakes and one attempt at scratch dinner rolls. I don't really remember the roll recipe that well, but I do remember that they didn't turn out like I expected them too.

Anyway, I woke up and said...let's make some bread. I started digging through many of the cookbooks we have in the house, including some on just making bread, and couldn't find anything as simple as I remembered "Granny's" being. So I gave up and turned to google..."simple bread", "easy bread"...grrr..."basic bread"...BINGO! Flour, sugar, salt, yeast, water...at the time I didn't remember that "Granny's" bread didn't have sugar, but I did know that yeast feeds on sugar so it seemed reasonable to me that this was about as simple as it could get.

A few hours later I had a decent loaf of bread. It certainly didn't blow me away, but it was good. I know that there were issues and at this point I can't recall exactly what was wrong with that first loaf, but I am thinking that it was mostly...boring. I am pretty sure that was the main issue because I remember that with subsequent attempts at the same recipe I tried different techniques to build more flavor. Each attempt failing to overcome boring. A couple of them also failed pretty big in one other area. Density. They were kind of brick like. Don't get me wrong all of the bread was edible, but it was all "meh".

It was suggested that I should use a recipe from King Author flour. So I found a recipe similar to what I had been making, I think it was called "hearth bread". As the dough was spinning around in the mixer it never started to form the "ball of dough" that I was expecting so I added more flour...a little more...a little more. Let's just skip the details and jump to "meh". Looking into it afterwards I figured out that this was a wet dough and wasn't going to come together like I was expecting.

Last week we came across "Granny's" recipe..."hmm no sugar...interesting". So Christmas Eve I dived into this even simpler recipe. It was a huge mess...literally. I converted the recipe from volume to weight, then cut it in half. "OK...I guess this is another wet dough." "Hmm...I don't think this was supposed to be flatbread"

The next day I got a not so subtle message from my family...wrapped up under the tree, two books on baking bread....and that is where we will begin our adventure.