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I’ve been meaning to get into bread making for a while. My plan was to get so good at it that I would make a living selling loaves to the local villagers and give up comedy. But I kept making and getting comedy based work which put back my baking plans.
This evening my wife was out “workingâ€, (if you can ever call podcasting working, which I CAN’T - unless I am doing it) and I had a couple of mildly poorly kids to entertain, so I thought I’d have a crack at a simple loaf recipe that I’d found on line.
As with all the cooking that I occasionally do (or at least the ones that transform from powder and a bit of milk or egg or whatever to become something totally different) I was pretty surprised at how basic making bread is at this level. Is bread really just made of flour, water, yeast and salt? I thought there would be more to it than that. And I suppose there can be. But we made a dough, all had a turn at kneading it and then stuck it in a bread tin with a cloth over it and waited for it to rise.
Which it slowly did.
And then it just went in the oven and 40 minutes later we had a loaf of bread that looked quite a lot like a proper loaf of bread. I had to get Ernie bathed and to bed at this point, but Phoebe and me had a piece of warm bread with butter after that. It was a little bit spongy, but I thought it tasted really good and there was a nice crust on it (and it was even better as toast in the morning).
What insane magic is this? My baking ambitions are entirely back on. Put your orders in now. Fuck comedy. What use is that? We all need bread. Apart from people who are intolerant to wheat or think that yeast is an animal. Which it might be. Or some kind of magic potion. Bread can’t just be flour and water. It makes no sense.
Everything I craft usually is imaginary and abstract and of immeasurable use, but one suspects little use. But without bread we’d actually die. So it’s nice to make something useful for once.
RHLSTP with Athena Kugblenu is here
Or on video here
