I’ve been experimenting with bread making the past 6 weeks and here are my working notes and conclusions from the flour-based fermentation arts:

1. Make your own bread.

Bread is easy to make. Most people would be better served by making their bread rather than buying it at the store.  A surprising amount of bread is made with ingredients that nobody knows how to pronounce and cheaply and unnecessarily sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.  Personally, like being able to know what’s in my food and making bread with 4 simple ingredients makes that possible.  Bread making is satisfying and requires minimal, simple, and inexpensive ingredients and some well-coordinated time investment on a week night or a weekend evening. That said…

2. Buy good bread if you don’t have time to make it.

If you know you’re not going to have time to make bread or if you are traveling for the weekend, by all means buy yourself a quality loaf at your local grocery store or bread artisan bakery. After all, if you are not a baker, your time is being invested elsewise in society and someone else is being paid to provide the service of making quality bread. Min/max your time and accept the fact that others are paid make tasty bits from flour, water, yeast, and salt while you provide your contributive task to society.  But before you rush off to the store to buy bread, thinking that you don’t have time to make your own, have a look at a bread recipe to see just how easy, fun, and satisfying bread making can be.  And if you do decide to buy bread, support bakeries who use simple, pronounceable, quality ingredients and who clearly love baking bread.  You’re eating it, after all.

3. Make some sourdough.

Sourdough is a pain in the ass. The most ancient way of making bread is highly unpredictable and takes for-fricking-ever; more than 24 hours in some cases.  You would think that basic, non-conflicting sage advice for sourdough making could be found in quality bread making books or on the internet… nope.  Sourdough starters the world over have different types of wild yeast, all of which require different rising times, proofing times, mixing methods, flour blends, temperature requirements, etc.  I’ve tried different combinations of these methods and I’ve failed twice to make a good sourdough loaf with a homemade starter; we’ll see how loaf 3.0 turns out tomorrow. Loaf 3.0 is from a San Fransisco starter that Dylan ordered online and shared with me. He has pieced together a recipe that works for him here and also took pity on me or got sick of answering the same questions over and over and thusly created a handy dandy graphic for me to follow to dehydrate the starter before using (because the starter came in the mail at 166% hydration… don’t ask, I can’t tell you.)  If I fail this time, I’m temporarily quitting sourdough for awhile and turning my efforts to ciabatta and foccacia breads.

So why should you bother making sourdough at all?  Because making sourdough makes you appreciate just how easy bread made with regular active dry yeast really is. Non-sourdough bread recipes which once seemed daunting and time consuming will now seem simplistic in comparison to sourdough. For example, I once thought bagels were too difficult to ever attempt again; now I look forward to making them when I can and I feel confident that they can be made in 1-2 hours on a Saturday morning, not just for special occasions.  Three cheers for active dry yeast!

Now go make some bread!