MAKING BREAD

Stories of bread making by real or fictional characters during pioneer times and even now in Amish colonies, made me want to make bread, too.
I’ve pored through cookbooks to figure out the magic required of raising bread dough but it seemed difficult and esoteric. How to produce those wonderul loaves pictured in cookbooks,and with little more than yeast, flour, sugar, salt, milk and butter? No one I knew made bread so I had no one to turn to until the opportunity to learn came when CARD held a breadmaking workshop one Saturday morning. The teacher was a baker for one of the college’s dining halls.
She brought dough for us to work on, but the best thing I learned was the “trick” of adding sugar to the yeast to ensure it’d be fed and would proof as it should.
Although at first I only had a portable hand mixer so the dough came up over the beaters and made a mess, I was determined to succeed and followed directions of kneading, a rising, forming loaves, another rising and baking them.
When baked, however, they were lopsided. It happened time and again. Why? Having no one to compare notes with, I never learned the mystery of that, but didn’t despair. The loaves tasted fine.
I finally found success after I bought a stand mixer with a dough hook. Mixing the dough was easier. The loaves turned out nearly like the cookbook photos and I gained confidence making different varieties: white, whole wheat, raisin, egg, whole wheat with sunflower seeds, multi-grain with walnuts, and even challah that my grandkids had fun braiding.
Now I eschew store bought breads, and even those of speacialty bakeries, because they are more expensive than I can make loaves from scratch.
It is somewhat disconcerting, however, when I say I make bread and listeners assume it is with a breadmaker, but look at me as if I’m foolish to spend hours doing it if I say “from scratch.”
But it is a joy when two loaves come out of the oven resembling pictures of professionals'(ahem!),and best of all, when sliced there are no large air pockets and the aroma of fresh bread fills the kitchen. Moreover, it costs little to make healthful and tasty breads one likes for just the cost of cups of flours of one’s choosing,milk, and scant amounts of yeast, salt, butter and sugar or honey.
Perhaps not everyone has time to bake bread as I do as a retiree, but even busy persons can still do it on a weekend even if they let a bread machine do the kneading first. It’s a relaxing activity, and you get a product that’s wonderful to eat!