Freshly baked bread

“I’m going to bake bread!” my husband Peter announced.

Inwardly, I said, “Oh, no.”

Baking bread is not easy — until it is. Every person I know who bakes bread will agree. If there’s someone out there who tried baking bread for the first time and it was a great success, I would like to hear about it because, in my experience, you have to bake a lot of bad bread before you bake anything close to edible. I was afraid Peter was about to find this out.

But what I said was, “Great, honey!”

A lot of people are trying to bake bread these days. Our store is still low on yeast and was out of flour for weeks. I wonder how many bags of flour and bottles of yeast are sitting around unused after a first, disastrous attempt. I remember when I first decided to bake bread.

“I’m going to bake bread!” I announced. There was no one around to discourage me.

I don’t know how many loaves of terrible bread I baked. I lost count. I tried all sorts of recipes. I blamed the altitude and the flour and the yeast. Nothing worked. I kept producing these heavy, unappetizing loaves, and the only thing that prevented me from giving them to the birds was my landlord, a portly man, who came by to chat almost every day. He would eat absolutely anything with enough butter and honey on it.

The full article is available in our e-Edition. Click here to subscribe.