Me & Bread Making!
My bread story is all about me and yeast never seeing eye to eye! J One Saturday afternoon about 10 years ago my daughter and I decided to try our hand at baking some little “bears” from a bread recipe I had just seen on Ciao Italia on PBS. It all seemed so simple when Mary Ann Esposito whipped it up and formed it into little bears that I thought to myself, “okay, maybe I’ve been avoiding bread baking un-necessarily”…..WRONG! But I digress….
My daughter was about 14 and thought the whole thing would be fun and frankly so did I! We proceeded to get out all the ingredients and I read just what I was supposed to do in the right order, etc. About the time the recipe said to put the yeast in warm water, I began breaking out in a cold sweat…there was that horrible word, yeast! There must be some sort of magical properties to it that only come together for ‘others’. We plowed on in spite of my misgivings and after a very long time, we finally fashioned about a dozen ‘bears’ and they did look so cute that we were mighty proud of ourselves. However, while forming them I began to think that perhaps something was amiss with the dough but wisely kept that thought to myself.
The upshot of this endeavor in self punishment was taking the buggers out of the oven, ooh-ing and aah-ing and letting them cool off in order to finally take that first delicious (??) bite. Darling daughter and I both bit into one and I swear to you that it’s no small wonder we didn’t have to rush right out to the dentist having broken one or more teeth! These babies were more like brick-bats (as my grandmother used to call anything hard as a rock) than they were innocent little bear breads! Needless to say, I haven’t baked a loaf of bread to this day, even though I consistently read “A Year In Bread” and I’m constantly blown away by your creations. I think I need one of you here in my kitchen helping me step by step…..I’ll call my daughter over who’s in her 20’s now and maybe we’ll finally get it right! Thanks for the opportunity to stroll down memory lane! J
Time in the kitchen with your daughter — how wonderful, no matter what the result. I hope you, or the two of you together, will try again sometime soon. It’s a rule that you have to have to bake a brick or three sometime in your baking career — so you’ve already got one behind you!
I love your header photo. Your garden?