Cooking: The joy of bread

The image of someone making bread seems to draw to mind a bored 1940s housewife or a chubby baker with a floppy hat. Baking bread isn’t really something people do; bread is meant to be bought from a grocery store, wrapped in a plastic bag sealed with a twist-tie. But making your own bread is really an easy and simple thing. 

You don’t need a fifty-dollar bread machine to make good bread. In fact, I argue against it. The best part about making bread is the making part. Yeah, bread is great homemade or not, but kneading and baking bread, getting the yeasty smell all over the house, that’s where the joy comes from.  

It’s really not that hard to bake bread, and most of the time it does take is leaving the dough alone to rise. Here’s how my usual bread-baking experience goes: 

I mix some warm water with a third-cup of sugar and three packets of yeast. Then I leave it there. I come back half an hour later and add six cups of flour, some salt and some oil. Then I knead the dough until it doesn’t rip when I stretch it. Leave it alone for an hour. Split the dough in half and let then rise another hour in the bread tins. I bake it for an hour and a half and let it cool.  

That’s all it takes. Some flour, some yeast and a lot of free time. But don’t forget about those hours of nothing; bread making isn’t something that requires lots of focus. Do your homework while the bread is rising (or binge Netflix, let’s be honest here).  

Sure, it’s more convenient to just go buy bread. But only by making bread will you fill your house with cooking aromas and get to take the first slice of a warm loaf of bread. It can be cathartic; you can punch and squash the dough basically as long as you like, perfect to release pent-up aggression. It’s cheaper in the long run to make your own bread than to buy it and you can avoid corn syrup and other ingredients you don’t want in your bread. These benefits are especially great when making gluten-free bread, as that can reach seven dollars per loaf at a grocery store.  

By making your own bread you can add whatever you wish to flavor your bread, or you can leave it plain to have butter and jam spread on it. Once you get into making bread, experimentation becomes exciting. Can your standard recipe be used to make dinner rolls? What happens if you add turmeric like people on that British baking show do? Really, the possibilities are endless.