Man can't live on bread alone? I'd be willing to try...

As regular readers know, I enjoy cooking. Regular long-time readers with an eye for details may have picked up that the whole time I was growing up, I was a pretty picky eater. One might conclude from this that I started cooking in order to better satisfy my food peculiarities, but this doesn't happen to have been the case.

When I went off to college, I actually became less picky. I think perhaps it was a combination of factors. On the one hand--and this just occurred to me as I sat down to write this--I think there may have been an element of conformity involved in my decision: I didn't want to stand out as strange and difficult, so I'd try new things. Also, though, I think that given the relatively limited meal options each day, I tried lots of different things just to discover which of my choices were preferable to the others.

None of this is where I intended to go with this entry, however. At the same time, I discovered something else in the dining hall: a variety of breads baked fresh daily. This was a revelation for me. Most of my childhood was spent consuming Wonder bread, the whitest of the white breads, and even when I grew into whole wheat breads and oatmeal and potato loaves, I was still eating the commercial bakery stuff you get in a small-town grocery store. Other than Italian bread or French bread, I encountered nothing resembling the product of a real bakery in all my youth. As I said, this was a revelation for me.

I couldn't get enough of this bread, and when I went home for the summer, I went into withdrawal. So, I taught myself how to bake. My mother had never baked a loaf of bread, other than dinner rolls out of a package, so I was venturing into new territory. She pointed me to her vintage Better Crocker Cookbook (she later bought me my own copy at a garage sale), where I learned the basics and experimented with white and wheat breads, as well as dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls from scratch. From there, I picked up other breads from here and there, eventually hitting on what became my favorite, standby bread: Honey Oatmeal bread in a cookbook published by a friend's mom, who's also a caterer. It became my standby not only because it was delicious, but also because it required no hand kneading, just a few minutes in the bowl of the Kitchen Aid mixer. 

Recently, I've become re-energized about bread baking, after Ari posted her Rustic Spinach Feta Bread along with a review of the book it's from, Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day. I'd still like to get that, as it sounds like a wonderful cookbook, but first I picked up another one she mentioned in that post, which had already been on my radar: The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Over the summer, my best friend made the pizza he baked in his wood-fired oven with the recipe from that book, and I'd looked at it then but wasn't ready to fork over the necessary cash just then. Since then I have and I've been playing around with some of the recipes. However, the primary value of The Bread Baker's Apprentice doesn't seem to be in the wonderful recipes it offers, but in the way that it works to teach the reader to bake bread. The writer, a teacher at Providence's own renowned Johnson and Wales University culinary school, is essentially writing the text for his class--for the rest of us. Filled with engaging personal anecdotes and solid teaching as well as great recipes, I anticipate that this will be a valued addition to my collection of cookbooks for years to come.

I've been so energized about baking bread that most days in the past several weeks have seen some sort of homemade bread perched on our counter, just waiting to bring pleasure to our palates. They've succeeded quite well. I leave you with a virtual sample of what I've been up to:

tags: bread  the bread bakers apprentice  

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