Craft Friday: Homemade Bread

Breadmaking has always been a fascinating thing.  There’s the chemistry of it – the yeast coming alive, the gluten developing, the rising and expanding.  And there are so many different types that all follow mostly the same pattern, the same essential steps.

I have lofty ambitions of making our bread a few times a week, and never buying any from the store.  It’s healthier and just tastes better.

Three guess as to whether that actually happens.

Right.

I haven’t actually made bread, other than corn bread or a no-knead dutch oven bread, since my KitchenAid broke a few months ago.  (Even though it has a dough hook, I really don’t think it’s made for actually kneading dough.)  I’ve got really weak, inferior wrists and they get enough of a workout typing and knitting.  I figured I’d give them a break and not try to make the bread by hand.  But we ran out this past week and forgot to buy some at the store.  Now, I’d probably be okay but Sebastian eats a peanut butter sandwich almost every day, so I figured I better suck it up and get to work.  

And it really is something I enjoy, even with helpers who, when given their own bowl of flour and water to mix, just eat the results.

And once I got going, I didn’t stop with just a couple loaves of wheat bread.  I decided the next night that I’d make falafels.  And you can’t have falafels without pita bread.  And so back to the dough I went.  Now, I’ve only been able to get pitas to puff up and create that pocket a couple of times, and this time wasn’t one of them.  But that doesn’t stop them from tasting super delicious.  

So even though I probably won’t be making all of our bread from scratch, I do enjoy the fact that I can, when needed, rise to the occasion.  (See what I did there?  Am comedic genius!)

And I probably will be trying to incorporate more homemade bread into our diet, if nothing else than to see my little helper covered in flour and sporting a dough face mask.