A Year in Bread

A Year in Bread



Today Susan, Beth, and I launched A Year in Bread. A Year is a blog dedicated to baking bread (and rolls and buns and even pizza). You can read the official story of how it came into being on the site, as well as what Susan and Beth have to say here and here. Please, go check out the blog, the three of us have been planning and working on it since the first week of January, and we're proud parents

I baked my first brick loaf of bread when I was 12 or 13 years old. Although not an outright disaster, the bread didn't rise more than an inch or two and had an atomic weight close to uranium.

I've no idea what I did wrong, but I tried a couple of more times with only a bit more success before giving up. You would have thought I'd learned my lesson. Nope. Some 18 years later, during a period between jobs, I decided to sell sandwiches make from fresh-baked croissants for a living — despite not having made anything more complicated than pancakes in the meantime. Oddly enough, although the business was an inspired failure, I managed to bake some extraordinary croissants — as good as anything I'd had in France.

Nevertheless I was relieved to find a real job so I could quit getting up at 4:00 in the morning to proof the croissants and then again at 6:00 to bake them and make sandwiches. Not to mention no longer spending every evening from 4:00 until 8:00 making the croissants so they could chill until 4:00 the next morning when I started over. That was 25 or so years ago and I haven't baked a croissant since. In fact, it was 10 years before I baked bread again.

Then I baked a loaf or two a year for a while until, in 1995, I bought a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. That made the difference. My time as a croissant baker had made me reluctant to spend the effort required to properly mix and knead bread. Keep in mind, for the croissants I was mixing and kneading enough bread — by hand — every day to make 50 or more croissants. (In fact, at Christmas that year I was making over 100 croissants on some days to fill special orders.)

With a stand mixer to do most of the mixing and kneading I started making more and more bread. These days I make bread about every three weeks. That serves almost all of my needs (except that I still like eating croissants and I'm still not making them) as well as bread I make for clients. These days I think nothing of making a loaf of bread, and I've learned enough so that even when I'm busy I can fit it into my schedule.

At the moment I have pizza dough undergoing its second fermentation (second rising) in preparation for my first post. We decided on pizza as the first thing to tackle because it's universally popular and an easy and forgiving bread. And because nothing so transforms this simple food as using good homemade dough.

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