The Daily Bread

There is a staple in almost every household that just isn't thought about much - bread.  Every week requires a few loaves for the constant peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or the toast with peanut butter supply that my children insist upon.  A piece of toast and cup of tea has helped soothe many an upset stomach over the years, and rarebit would just be so much cheese sauce on a plate without it.

When I was in high school, I had a German exchange partner and one of the things that she found most unusual in the United States was the "soft bread" - it mystified her.  Only after I spent four months in Germany did I fully understand why.  They buy their bread from a local baker typically several times a week and it is a very dense, rich, crusty bread.  We would take sandwiches to school because they didn't serve school lunches there, and it would consist of dry bread and liverwurst.  At first I truly thought I was going to starve to death, but I sometimes now find myself thinking back longingly on those sandwiches because, as it turned out, they were really good and largely due to the bread.

I have always liked making yeast breads and made quite a few loaves during my early days on the farm, but I have to give credit to my husband as being the main "bread maker" of the house.  He took over this job with gusto a few years ago and we haven't seen pre-sliced bread in quite some time now. My husband remarked the other day that we have been eating home made bread for so long that we no longer say, "homemade bread"....it's just "bread".  This homemade bread making started with my daughter's diagnosis of celiac disease.  Suddenly, bread was the enemy - unsafe for her consumption and we had to find an alternative.  There are several gluten free breads that are commercially produced now, but I haven't found any of them that are very tasty, so my husband set out to find a recipe that would work for her and taste good enough for her to want to eat every day at school, because everything (and I do mean everything) in a public school cafeteria has wheat in it one way or another.  He also took on the challenge of making wheat bread for the rest of the family as well. 

On average, there are between two and four loaves of bread consumed by the "wheat eaters" in the house in a given week depending upon the meals we make.  My daughter and I (since I also started to eat gluten free in solidarity with her and found that my allergies and several other chronic health issues completely disappeared as well)...we eat about one or two loaves between us during the week.  That can add up to a lot of bread.

Now.....here's a test....how do you make a loaf of yeast bread?

This is something that for countless generations was just known.  People (typically the women) made bread all the time....daily.  It was probably such a reflex action that I would imagine they would knead the bread in their sleep if they had to, and yet today there are not too many people that would really have the first idea of where to start to make a loaf of bread.  Not that it is imperative that people make all their own bread, but it is usually a good idea to know what should be in it.  Reading a bread label shouldn't take an advanced degree in chemistry.

The other day while riding in the car with one of my daughters, she happened to mention something about a friend eating Wonder bread.  I looked at her and smiled and asked, "You know why it is called 'Wonder' bread'?"  My daughter knows me well enough to know that I was not about to say anything favorable about this highly processed and mostly fake food and said in answer, "because we 'wonder' what is in it?"  To which I could only smile and nod.

The Basics:
Warm water 
Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Oil
Flour

Anything additional and you start making "fancy" breads.  Add some whole wheat flour and make "whole wheat bread", add oatmeal and raisins and you will have "oatmeal, raisin bread"   Bread dough is a very forgiving substance, but it does help if the basics are down.  Knowing how to proof the yeast, for instance - some bread makers swear by it, others, well....we fly by the seat of our pants.  Knowing how and why bread 'rises' or better yet, knowing how to catch and use free-living yeast from the air to make bread is a State Fair trip in the making for any kid.   Bread machines are nice, but really don't provide anything extra that you don't already have on hand.  They do, however, take out the fun parts of bread making that include punching down the dough and kneading it.  One day, while in an especially bad mood, I worked out some aggression on the innocent lump of dough that had been nicely rising.  My son happened by and remarked, "Mom, remind me never to make you mad, okay?"  Making bread can, in some ways, be very therapeutic.

The best part, by far, is how baking bread makes the house smell.  Walking into a house with bread baking in the oven is quite possibly one of the most soothing smells in the world.  Warm bread....the very thought of it can comfort the sorest of souls.

The difficult part, for most people, is finding the time to make bread.  It has to be mixed and kneaded, then it has to rise for one or two hours, then it gets kneaded again and shaped, then rises a second time for another hour, then baked. This can seem like an extensive process for a single loaf of bread, but when thought of in segments it becomes less odious - mix, knead....play a game of Life with the kids....knead, shape.....go for a run or do chores outside....bake while starting dinner.....then enjoy warm bread with dinner.  All together the time spent actually making the bread is about 30 minutes and the time that it has to sit and rise is more of a guideline rather than a set amount of time - if the game of Life goes on for two hours, that's okay because the dough will keep.  As it turns out, Gluten Free bread is actually easier in the sense that it only has to rise once and then be cooked.  There have been instances at this house where we will have three loaves of bread and two pizza crusts all rising at the same time - we almost need a flow chart to figure out which ones go in the oven when.


With the majority of the bread being now made by my husband, I haven't had to think of it often, but periodically I am left in the care of his dough as it is rising while he does a few odd jobs for neighbors in the area or runs one kid or another here or there for band or sports practice.  This is an honor that I do not take lightly, but I do have a tendency to handle my own bread dough a little differently - every baker does, I think.  It becomes more of an art form than food after a while, and we all have our certain way of making sure that it rises as well as it can, doesn't have air holes and stays soft despite being forgotten about by whatever errant child forgets to put it away after carving off a slice. My bread art comes in the form of pizza crust that is made every Sunday evening to be shared while watching whatever family movie we agree upon - our only meal to be eaten while perched in front of the television, but it has become something of a family tradition.  Regardless of who makes it, as an art form, bread in all its many forms is perhaps the tastiest.