Baking obsession!

So. I've got tons of time on my hands these days, and I'm currently recovering from two weeks of being sans computer. It was painful. I played a lot of Wii and watched way too many episodes of Top Gear. I ran out of things to clean in the kitchen. I got my cross-stitching out. It was scary.

But. Something wonderful has come out of all this time spent cooped up in the house. I started baking bread. And subsequently have become slightly obsessed with it.

This was not my first foray in to the yeasty fun that is making one's own bread. The first loaves of bread I ever baked came about because I wanted a ham sandwich but was too lazy to drive my car up to the grocery store. So I opted to delay the toast by a few hours in order to make my own bread. Just a plain loaf of white bread. It was okay. After that I got into honey wheat and pumpkin breads, and I found a novel recipe that produced loaves shaped like teddy bears. But I had a job (and was possibly also going to school at that time), so the amount of time required to make these loaves quickly negated any novelty derived from making my own bread (teddy bear-shaped or not). I had also steered clear of recipes that called for starters, both out of impatience and unfamiliarity.

This was all about five years ago, when I was still temping for Sole Tech (and before I got hired on permanently). I made a loaf or two last fall, but up until recently, I'd been more concerned with perfecting my recipes for cheesecake, tortillas, oatmeal cookies, and shortbread. There's still a little bit of work to be done with shortbread, but I think I've got the other three down. Even if I'm forced to make tortillas for fussy vegetarians who won't let me use lard to make them. Anyway. Needless to say, really teaching myself to make bread hasn't quite been at the forefront of my baking concerns.

And then the power cord on my computer went kaput. School's out, can't find a job, and now have no way to entertain myself whilst cloistered up in my room. Which meant I had to venture downstairs. But after a day or two I felt like I needed to do something besides stare vacantly at the television and giggle at the antics of my housemates. More importantly, I ran out of bread before I ran out of eggs. I have developed a bit of an addiction to poached eggs on toast. So nice at any time of day.

So with all that time on my hands and appropriately armed with flour and yeast, I set about making some bread. The first try was white bread, which is nice, but I've never really liked white bread. So the next trip to the grocery store turned into a flour expedition. I was still wary of strong bread flour, thinking it would make really tough loaves, not the fluffy sandwich bread I was after, so I settled with whole wheat flour. The wheat loaves were okay, but I made a mistake when I decided to add molasses and honey to the dough. Nice as toast, but too sweet for much else. Then I tried to make oatmeal bread, which also turned out okay, but I overcooked it and it was a little too dry for my liking.

All this was done with the aid of my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, which also happens to be my kitchen bible. It's got sections of recipes for everything from bread to cookies to meat to canning and freezing. One of these days I'm going to sit down and read the thing cover to cover because there are a lot of sections I haven't had cause to look at yet. More often than not, if I'm working from a recipe, the recipe is from that book. It's fantastic. The only downside is that it doesn't really explain its method. Luckily for me, I've got both of Alton Brown's cookbooks, which do go into the whithertos and whyfores of the processes of cooking and baking. And since my bread endeavors weren't really producing the kinds of loaves I was after, I figured I needed to read up on Alton and what he had to say about bread making. And to be sure, he was helpful, but I felt like I was still missing something.

There was only one more place for me to go before launching myself onto the internet in search of a bread-making how-to: Julia Child's The Way To Cook. And with that, my bread-making turned a corner. Unsure as to how everything would turn out, I tried my hand at her french bread recipe one night.

It. Was. Glorious. I actually danced around the kitchen. My housemate looked at me funny, but only for as long as it took him to try a bite.

And even more so than before, I was hooked. So now instead of spending 30p on a loaf of Sainsburys Basics bread, I spend 79p on a bag of strong bread flour and make half a dozen baguettes. The only constraint on my baguette production is the small oven I have to work with (and the fact that I'm certain the temperature gauge is lying to me). Armed with what Julia has taught me about the rising process, I'm fairly certain I should be able to finagle my way into making lovely, light, fluffy sandwich bread. Tomorrow. I'd do it tonight, but I've spent too much time writing this and it's now a bit too late to devote the five hours it takes from start to finish.



***THIS IS A FRAGMENT***
...never did get around to finishing it, but here you go anyway...