Sunday Baking Series: The Miracle of Bread

Bread gets a bad wrap these days. It always seems like everyone is trying to “cut down” on their bread intake, be it calories, carbs, gluten, or whatever other fad diet grabs our attention. And yet, bread has sustained humans for thousands of years.

I’ve posted many times about our breadventures on Instagram, but I really need a long-form location to wax poetic about how important bread-making and bread-eating are. A combination of unremarkable and otherwise unfilling ingredients- flour, water, yeast, and salt- when combined and baked in any one of a million ways, becomes such an important form of nourishment.

We are working our way through many such bread recipes, but my favorite thing to make is classic rustic country loaves, also called boules or miches, because the end result never fails to astonish. Even within this bread genre, there are a million ways to get to the end result. And because of all the itty-bitty variations, there is so much to learn!

Because neither of us are bread-experts, for now, we are sticking with precision. Precision isn’t exactly my style, but I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again- baking is mostly a science, so changing too many variables at once can lead you astray for reasons you cannot suss out.

Eventually, I hope to get to the point where I am comfortable changing flour content, hydration amount, type of yeast, temperatures during proofing, etc. But today is not that day. Today is a day for learning, and also a test of patience. Hubtastic excels in both those areas, which explains why the best bread we’ve made so far was made entirely while I was at work.

I love that bread-making is tactile, too. The feel of dough squishing through your fingers is similar to squeezing a stress ball, but more productive. And the way dough transforms as the ingredients combine and the gluten strengthens is nothing short of amazing. I’ve found that making something by hand gives a sense of control that we don’t often get in other facets of life- and I’m not the first person to recognize this!

And that’s without even talking about how good the house smells throughout the process. From the second the yeast activates to the time the loaves cool down, something really special lingers in the air. The best aromatherapy.

Even a dud of a loaf is edible, and far more delicious than anything you can pick up in the supermarket. That’s a big part of the beauty of making your own bread- even the simplest recipes in the hands of a total beginner produce something awe-inspiring.

The most thrilling moment of bread baking – and the reason I keep going back for more- is the moment I open the oven and see the massive loaf that, hours before, was just a little pile of wet flour. Even the rising process amazes me- I walk away and do something else (like sleep), and when I come back, the flour and water have turned in to a big, cohesive, fluffy ball. I know the science of yeast and gluten and oven spring and all that, but the experience is astonishing every time. Even after many loaves of bread, I still feel like “I made that?!?” when I slice into the loaf and glimpse the crumb structure for the first time.

So let’s take back bread from being a forgotten and even feared component of a meal, and put it back in the center, where it belongs.

If you’re ready to have a breadventure of your own, here are some great books to start with (I find cookbooks better than online because I have to refer to the process sporadically over 24+ hour timespans, and I don’t want to keep reloading web pages!):

1. “I’ve never done this before”: King Arthur website; Paul Hollywood’s Bread
2. “I’m in love and I want to go deeper”: Flour, Salt, Water, Yeast
3. “I’m confident in my senses and want to explore”: Heritage Baking