Baking bread, again

 I don't remember a time when I didn't bake but I can't remember how it began.  Perhaps I watched my Mom make cookies and maybe she drafted me into the baking world. I am certain I was making chocolate chip Toll House cookies, the recipe on the back of the Nestle's chocolate chip package, from the time I was about 12 years old. Then peanut butter cookies and oatmeal and cookies that were called Cowboy Cookies which had oats, chocolate chips, coconut and walnuts. They were delicious.

My baking branched out from there: brownies from the Joy of Cooking, from the Los Angeles times came the famous Sour Cream Coffee Cake with brown sugar crumbly bits and eventually Carrot Cake with cream cheese frosting. Linzer Tarts, flourless chocolate cake, Petit Fours, fruit crisps, biscuits.....  I baked everything.  I have even made two wedding cakes, one for Gabe and Annie's wedding and one for my brother John's wedding to Emily last year.  (Both were Carrot Cakes with cream cheese frosting, by the way.)

Somewhere along the way, when I was in my late teens, I started baking bread as well. No one in my family baked bread so it certainly wasn't a family tradition but once I started, I was hooked.  I loved the feeling of kneading the dough as it went from sticky to smooth and elastic.  Watching the bread rise over a few  hours was like culinary magic to me. Punching it down, rising again, popping it into the oven and smelling that luscious smell of baking bread.... few smells are better than that. 

Who doesn't like homemade bread? Who would say "No" to a piece of warm, fresh-from-the-oven bread slathered with soft butter? While I can't really remember what kind of bread I made initially, I am guessing it would be the honey oatmeal bread that I still make today.  It was a recipe in a series of cookbooks produced by "Woman's Day" magazine, in the section about  baking at Christmas. (I made dozens of varieties of cookies from that same Christmas section as well.) The honey oatmeal bread wasn't difficult and always turned out perfectly. It's slightly sweet, soft in texture with the nutty taste of oats. It makes perhaps the best toast in the world.

Lately I have been making a loaf a week. Sometimes it's honey oatmeal, often it's a plain white bread or a crusty loaf of rosemary bread. Making bread is very easy and is very cheap to produce. No preservatives, just simple ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, sugar, water or milk.  The rest (oats, honey, molasses, butter, eggs, herbs) are all optional.  

Over the years there have been dismal failures, of course. A few times I killed the yeast with too hot liquid, a couple of times the yeast was too old and wouldn't rise, now and then I bake it too long. But 95% of the time the bread is damned good.

It's time to make a grilled cheddar and tomato sandwich with the loaf of white bread I made yesterday. Sorry you can't be here to have one with me.  Maybe next time.