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Baking Your Own Bread Is The Height Of Achievement
I love freshly baked artisanal bread. I love the smell and the crunching sound of toast as it crumbles when you break it apart. I love how good bread signals that the dining adventure you are about to embark on is off to a good start.
It was this exquisiteness that I have always wanted to relive at home where I dine most frequently anyway. But how? I have never baked anything in my life. I love baked goods, but never saw the point of making them myself. Why go through all that science I had deliberately left behind in high school when I can order a cheesecake by phone? Why waste time on something that other people have already spent years trying to replicate?
That has always been my relationship with bread — essential but impersonal, and worse, commercial.
That changed when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Suddenly, dining adventures have been put on hold. My income is in limbo. I have utilities, not just food, to pay for. I now had to line up for the commercial white bread I had loathed because that is what I could afford.
Unless I make my own bread.
It took a good ten weeks of isolation to force me out of my procrastination and unwarranted fears because this was no mean feat. This was bread. This was life. This is the food that brought me to life at the start of each brand new day. This is the food I grew up loving. Baking bread was daunting because baking bread made life possible. Why would an inexperienced noob like me mess with something like that?
And isn’t baking a hard science? All those exact measurements seem to take away the fun in the improvisational nature of cooking, which I love. It felt like a mathematical ordeal, and math is not exactly one of my strongest suits.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, because in a pandemic, it helps to minimize needs, especially if you are trying to be vegan like me. I did not want to ever need bread or resort to expensive bad bread, so I finally made my first vegan bread using this recipe from Food.
