Practice Makes Delicious

Fresh bread is a powerful thing that makes me do silly things like write this post…

Two weeks ago, I took a leap of faith and baked my very first loaf of yeast bread. To be honest, I don’t know what got into me that day. I suppose I wanted to convince my parents that getting me a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer for Christmas was the best idea to ever cross their minds. Well, second to this idea, at least.

Prior to that fateful day, I was absolutely terrified to bake bread.

I was intimidated by yeast. I would immediately toss out recipes that called for yeast and/or mentioned the act of kneading. I always thought you can just buy bread at the grocery store.

But I was wrong…in so many ways.

1) Yeast is actually very easy to work with 2) Kneading is fun and stress relieving…or effortless if you have a stand mixer 3) Grocery store bread is to homemade bread as instant coffee is to fine Italian espresso.

There is just no comparison.

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If you can heat up a can of soup, you can bake a loaf of bread.

Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration but I promise, baking bread is really not as hard as it may seem. I think baking bread is a heck of a lot easier than baking a lot of other things. You just have to know a few tricks and not be afraid to experiment a little.

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I’ve found that the most challenging aspect of baking bread is interpreting vague directions.

Bread recipes don’t hold your hand through every single step and tell you exactly what to do. They can’t. There are a whole slew of factors that can affect your bread dough from start to finish such as the humidity, the temperature, the brand of flour, the way you knead the dough, yadda yadda yadda.

Well, what do you do then?!

Sometimes following directions to a T can lead you astray. Take a cake for example, instead of observing my cake, I simply go along with the instructions. If Martha says bake it for 45 minutes then I’m baking it for 45 minutes! Perhaps my cake was done after 30 min. but because I followed her directions (love you Martha) I ended up over-baking my cake.

The moral of the story is when it comes to bread you have to trust your instincts. And you just have to practice enough times for your instincts to actually be legit. Practice makes delicious!

I’ve only ever made 7 loaves of yeast bread and I can already say, I may never buy a loaf of grocery store bread ever again.

Come on, 7 loaves?! I’m still a beginner!

I’ll probably be “practicing” for the rest of my life. But by simply reading a few paragraphs in some bread baking books, I feel much more confident about baking bread already. Every loaf is a new learning experience for me…and also a delicious eating experience.

I intended on writing a post on all the nerdy tips I learned from those books, but I got a little sidetracked and wrote a persuasive essay instead. I’ve gotten too many comments and emails from you all telling me how scared you are to bake bread and I want to show you there’s absolutely nothing to fear.

I’ve also gotten quite a few comments and emails telling me how I’ve inspired you to bake bread for the very first time. YES!!

Nerdy bread baking tips coming soon! Starting with…

Yeast. It’s a beautiful a thing.