Recently, I have been getting into making bread.
I used to make bread a lot when I was younger; the first house I owned had, for some illogical reason, a space heater in the gap under the stairs. The cat liked to sleep directly on the stair above it, and it made for a nice little bread proving space when I wasn’t using it to dry laundry.
Growing up, my best friend’s family always had a ‘proper loaf’ on the go, which we would carve great wonky chunks off and singe under the eye-level gas grill.
At ours, we had terribly sensible sliced bread, and a toaster. Good enough but not ‘proper toast’.
So when I had my own place, I started making my own proper loaves. Not frequently, just whenever the mood struck.
Wherever I’ve lived since, I’ve never found a better place to rest dough than that weird understairs hotbox.
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We have been in this house now for 5 years and it is just about, almost, nearly, kind of starting to feel like home.
Part of that is making the shift from ‘house we are renovating’ to ‘house we live in’.
That, plus my aim to live more seasonally and develop daily routines that are more than just work-eat-sleep-repeat, has led to me baking bread regularly again.
I was also bored witless of the low-sugar bread available from the supermarket: not so much a loaf of bread, more of an artistic representation of bread, that never went mouldy or stale, even after several weeks.
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I have just bought a compact mixer, to replace my old FastBake machine and I’m finding it really useful.
I’ve been experimenting with rise-times and so on, factoring in using date syrup instead of refined sugar, my go-to sugar replacement.
I have, arriving today hopefully, three giant pure cotton tea towels and a razor blade on a stick. These should help me get the ‘perfect rise and oven-spring’.
I am bemused about the new lexicon of bread-making. I assume these words were always used in professional bakeries, but have been commandeered by hipster men, in the same way coffee and home brew have.
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I’m not doing sourdough.
I am very much childfree by choice, easily distracted and chronically task/demand avoidant, and the thought of tending, endlessly, to a stinky, sticky alien lifeform in a Kilner jar creeps me out no end.
I’ll leave sourdough to the type-A hipsters and Taylor Swift.