Bread 'from scratch'

My husband told a young man of his acquaintance that I'd started making bread from scratch. The young man likes to cook, you see, and my husband thought he'd be interested in the doings of someone else who likes to cook.

'Oh,' the young man said, perking up, 'What type of bread machine did she buy?'

'She doesn't have a machine. She made it by hand,' my husband informed the fellow. For which information he got something along the lines of a blank stare.

'Why would she do that?' the young man asked, when he got his voice together.

'Because it's fun,' my husband said...

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't think bread machines are inherently bad. If I get gimpier or my hands get to hurting too much, or I have to take on many more work hours, I might use one myself someday. And, if we ate a tremendous quantity of breadstuffs around here, I could see a bread machine might make sense, at least during more harried days and weeks.

But why in the Sam Hill, if you're able, would you let a machine have all the fun? (So to speak.) I ask you.

Perhaps too many of us in recent decades have been influenced by people who look down on housework, including cooking, as drudge work - but at the same time consider cooking, especially from scratch, to be the sort of thing that is beyond their capacity to learn. (Yes, I know that's a bit inconsistent, but people tend to be inconsistent, don't they? Or perhaps it's merely a variation on "sour grapes"?) And bread making in particular is often held up these days as Very Hard Indeed. Not to mention Something That Takes A Lot of Time. And also Somehow Different From Other Cooking. And, of course, Reported to Be Prone to Failure... especially if you aren't born with some vaguely mystical magical inner gift for cooking that some folks seem to think exists. (As if even the best cook around didn't have to learn to cook? Even, for all intents and purposes, learn to cook over and over again as he/she took on new types of food? Hello?)

Well. I'm prepared to be humbled a few times by batches that don't turn out (I've made three types of bread so far, and so far I seem to be having beginner's luck, but I'm not kidding myself that I know what I'm doing yet).

On top of that, bread making doesn't really take quite the time or effort that I'd been led to think it might. You do have to be around at the right times, but that's true of a lot of things. Including the average family dinner.

And it is fun. And a great stress buster.

So I intend to keep at it. I intend, in fact, to make up recipes until I invent a bread or two or three uniquely mine. Translation: I have a hard time sticking to recipes. I love to experiment in the kitchen. :)

(Did I mention that I'm prepared to be humbled by batches that don't turn out?)

Of course, you're visiting the blog of someone whose favorite classes in school included labs for chemistry and physics. People who love chem lab are naturals for cooking, I think, because cooking gives you the same sort of thrills and experience and feedback, and (barring the inevitable, occasional flubs) - tah dah! - you get to eat the results.

But, anyway, even for folks who don't like to 'invent' food, bread baking is fun, I think, and the most fun comes in the stages that people with bread machines cede to the machine.

The dough changes as you knead it. Very curious, that. And that going from a smallish solid mass to an airy largish mass during the risings (aka proofs) is interesting, too. And that whooshing sound that often happens when you punch the dough down? I kind of get a kick out of that. (I know, I know, I'm too easily amused. But there it is.)

Do you ever wonder (I do), how we ever got to this point? I mean, who in their right mind would have tried eating yeast bread in the first place? Really? I mean, if you were sitting around minding your own business and the dough you'd made for flat bread happened to pick up yeast from the air (which fact you wouldn't know, of course) and bubbled and expanded and smelled different from usual, would you turn to someone and say, 'Let's beat the air out of that and pat it into shape and see what happens?'

OK, maybe you'd do that. Maybe I'd do that. Especially if the food supply was tight.

But, when it bubbled and smelled and spilled itself out of a container or crept over the edge of the counter a second time, seeming strangely alive in an odd and unprecedented way, would you even consider trying to cook it and eat it? If you weren't crazy, I mean?

I'm glad our ancestors figured it out, and shared, and that cooks through the ages have improved our knowledge of how all this works. But I wonder - if I'd been at the front end of all this, with no one I trusted to tell me it was good that way - if I wouldn't have been scared of the stuff and thrown it away and started over?

Update: Melissa Wiley and her children are also beginner breadbakers, and they've got a bread blog - Peace of Bread - where they're collecting their successes, failures, recipes, notes, questions and answers. Check out, for instance, The Science of Bread.