The joy of bread

I used to hear of people making bread, and I pretty much wrote them off as purists who like to brag.

I was right.

I'm not going to go down the line of events that led me to try making my own bread. It did have to do with successful dinner roll recipe that spurred my interest in more yeasty conquests.

I now use a book that allows you to make huge batches of knead-less dough that keeps in the fridge until you want to bake it. This is tremendously useful for someone who's very poor at planning!!

The book I use is Healthy Bread in Five minutes a day. They aren't kidding. It takes a few minutes to assemble the ingredients to make the dough, then it goes in the fridge. When you want to bake, grab a hunk of dough, shape it to your liking (bread sticks, rolls, pizza dough, sandwich bread, bagels, etc) and BOOM. You've got bread.

This makes me supremely happy for some reason. Living in the country has it's advantages and disadvantages. We are lucky to have a very decent grocery store about 10 minutes away, but when it snows...it could be a mile away and I couldn't get there.

This has made me think differently about whats in my house. I don't load up- it's not easy or effective to store up food. I've found a better method- learning how to mke EVERYTHING from the simplest of ingredients. This goes from making my own sandwich bread all the way down to making powdered sugar in my blender. The shorter my grocery list- the happier I am. And bread contributes to this.