I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve become obsessed with bread. And not the kind you buy pre-sliced at the store—the kind that makes your kitchen smell like heaven and will have your heart skip a beat.
Truthfully, I’ve been scared to try baking it myself for some time now. Kneading? Rising? What if I ruin it? But here I am, staring at a blob of dough that might—or might not—turn into something edible, with a Dutch oven I just bought, staring back at me like a challenge.
This post won’t have a recipe. Not today anyways. Perhaps once I have truly mastered the art of bread baking I will post one. For this experiment, I used the what appears to be a simple recipe. I will also dig out the go-to recipe my mother-in-law sent me years ago, but I fear that I will need to knead that recipe. I don’t want difficult bread, with all that kneading. To me there is so much guess work: “is it kneaded enough?” or “have I over kneaded?”. These are the fears and the struggles I have faced with conquering my fear of baking bread, even after taking a bread baking class! I just want this to be a simple, easy process, and — of course — DELICIOUS.
I think often about a retirement side hustle for some extra cash, for fun and to simply keep busy, no matter where we are. I think I have thought about it more over the last few years because the “good life” is creeping up. And now, I actually see it in our future and it IS on our horizon.
I have shared with you that I don’t really enjoy baking. But bread doesn’t seem to me to be the same as baking a pie, or cookies or a cake from scratch. And lets face it — bread is just so damn good. I really just want to bake easy loaves of bread or buns, just for fun. Now there is a snappy name for a business Fun Buns!
Sometimes I have all these ideas, but I don’t know how to make them come to life. It’s like only one half of my brain works. The side that dreams. But the side that executes a plan doesn’t work. And that is just so ironic because in my life, at work, I make things happen, I am a doer. So why in God’s name, can I not formulate a retirement plan?
So this entire obsession with bread as I previously posted started not long ago when I was under the weather, doom scrolling and came accross @shelikesmilk https://shelikesmilk.com/. (Please note: no doom found there with Hailey). I was truly inspired and thought I can soooo do this. And as I continued to research this bread baking idea, I noticed that most use a dutch oven, something I didn’t have in my pantry. I decided I needed to fix that if I was really going to give this a try. With thanks to Superstore and their stamps program, I was able to acquire a Kuhn Rikon Dutch oven recently without actually breaking the bank.
And for the last week Milo (which I have just now dubbed my Dutch oven) has been sitting front and centre on my stove, staring at me reminding me that I promised to try baking bread in a cast iron Dutch oven. And that’s where we are today.
I don’t know friends: I keep walking by and looking at this dough and don’t feel like it is rising. Is my house not warm enough? Did I mess up the yeast or the temperature of the water? It has 4 ingredients, how could I possibly mess this up? This its definately chipping away at my confidence of success here!
Fear, flour, and a little persistence—sometimes that’s all it takes. Here is my first journey figuring out this bread thing, one loaf at a time!
