Baking Bread

One afternoon during the winter, DH happened to be channel surfing when he came across an Oprah show featuring Michael Pollan discussing his book, Food Rules. We were very interested and listened as he suggested that one not eat anything that one’s grandmother would not recognize as food or anything with ingredients that a school child cannot pronounce. We had just watched the film, “Food, Inc.”, so we found all this quite interesting. He also mentioned the rule that one should not eat anything that doesn’t rot or spoil.

A few days later, I was checking through the fridge and found a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread that had never been opened. This was in February and the sell by date for the bread was October. The really scary part was that the bread looked as if I had just bought it. Yikes! We checked the ingredients and, of course, there were enough preservatives to keep it fresh until next October.

Now there are quite a few very good bread bakeries not far from us and the supermarket in the next town carries bread from most of them. They don’t use any preservatives or anything artificial, but I decided that I would rather bake my own. I own a Zojirushi bread machine, which had been relegated to the garage, so I went out to rescue it and dust it off.



On our next trip to New Hampshire to visit DS #1, I made a side trip to the King Arthur factory store and stocked up on sour dough starter and all kinds of interesting flours, such as Ancient Grains and Harvest Grains. I started baking different kinds of bread, using my bread machine to knead the bread only. The more I got into it, the more ingredients I needed – vital wheat gluten, grains and seeds to top the bread, 9 grain flour, and it goes on and on. Then I decided to try making English Muffins, which required muffin rings and a raft of new ingredients - hi-maize fiber, malted wheat flakes, and non-diastatic malt powder (whatever that is).





Since we don’t go to New Hampshire that often, the woman who delivers our mail started dropping off big boxes from King Arthur. It seemed as if it was getting out of control, but every loaf of bread was better than the last and we decided that there is no comparing homemade English muffins with the store bought – even the organic, no preservative store bought ones.




So today, I set about making my second loaf of the week and had a terrible time finding a recipe for which I had enough ingredients. I finally settled on 9 grain bread sweetened with maple syrup. I’m not sure what we’ll have next week, since supplies are getting low, but there is a visit to New Hampshire in my future, so that will mean another side trip to King Arthur.