Charlotte Mason recommends teaching children “handicrafts,” as in useful skills, in addition to their liberal arts education. Upon reflection, I decided that while I could not teach my kids plumbing or electrical wiring, I probably should be able to teach them to cook, or at least, to bake. So a few weeks ago on Friday (our “other” day in the school week) we made pretzels! Yes, I know, important lifetime skill, that. We had just had a really good one from Auntie Anne’s in the mall that week, and I thought, “I bet I could make one of these…”

Hey, it’s baking, right? We found a recipe on about.com, and had a good time. I’m not sure they turned out as well as Auntie Anne’s – but it’s hard to say as I overtoasted them when attempting to rewarm them later in the day, and never ate one fresh out of the oven.

Look pretty good, huh?

I just got Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads out of the library last week. Being a slight “bread head” myself, I have been studiously reading through the introductory chapters which explain Reinhart’s bread journey and the successes and failures and discoveries he’s made along the way. What I love about the author is that he seems to understand, not only the techniques and practices of breadbaking, but the underlying appeal: bread is mysterious and magical, ordinary, yet inexplicable. He ends chapter one saying:

“That bread can be simultaneously so simple and yet so complex and fraught with the potential for maddening, powerful, stop-you-in-your-tracks questions and puzzles, sending you on endless searches for new ways to evoke its fullest potential, is reason enough why bread baking is now and will always remain such a compelling, fascinating metaphoric mystery. I said it before and will continually declare: ‘Bread has been around for over six thousand years, and it is not going away.’  ”

Yes! Exactly! I can’t wait to get back to baking in the fall!

Success!\par
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It’s Beautiful! And it’s really good, too!\par
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Rosanne is my in-house tester, and she hasn’t had any yet, but I think it’s pretty good. Judah agrees.\par
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Recently the woman at our church who has selflessly made the communion bread for our weekly communion service nearly 52 weeks a year for several years announced that she was tired and requested volunteers to share the burden. Bread being kind of my thing, I volunteered, and got the honor (?) of being the first in the rotation to\’c3\’82\’c2\~attempt to duplicate this most special bread recipe. It’s not every day you get to make a new-to-you recipe for practically everyone you know to try, is it? Yes, you might say I’m a little nervous.\par
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Well, naturally I thought\’c3\’82\’c2\~I’d better try a dry run to get some practice\’c3\’82\’c2\~to make sure that I could do it at all! Not wasting any time I tried it on Monday (the day after I learned that I was making it this Sunday!). I think it’s going to be OK.\’c3\’82\’c2\~My first loaf turned out rather unevenly (it’s a braided round loaf, and getting it even all the way around will be quite a trick), which made part of it more done than the other part, although I think I over did even the fatter part. I used my thermometer. The first time I checked it, it was 160 degrees inside the fatter part, so I added 8 minutes to the time. When I checked it after 8 minutes it was over 200 – and I was shooting for 180-185! So yes, it was more dry and crumbly than it should be, and I will have to be careful when I do it again tomorrow(!!).\par
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However, in terms of the ratios of ingredients I think I approximated pretty well. Sharon (the original maker) got the recipe from a bread and breakfast – the recipe originally called for 16 cups of flour!!! She cut it in half, for ease of use, but only uses a little over half of the dough for communion bread, keeping the rest for sweet rolls or an extra loaf of bread. Well, my mixer will not handle 8 cups of flour. I tried to use this as a reason we needed to buy a Bosch mixer, but my husband was unconvinced – so I cut the recipe down to 6 cups of flour and adjusted the other ingredients accordingly. The only problem is that 3/4s of 3/8ths of a cup of shortening is 0.28 cups. And how do you exactly measure 1/4 Tablespoon of salt? Well, fortunately, bread is pretty forgiving, and my last-resort method of “eyeballing it” didn’t seem to negatively impact the taste. Talking to Sharon about it, she also explained that she rolls the ropes in flour before braiding them to keep them from merging together too much during baking, and other helpful hints. So I think that my first non-test attempt tomorrow should go pretty well. But, I’ll start early so that if I have to do it twice, I’ll have time!\par
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(I’ll post a picture if I remember to take one!)

Last week was potato bread week. For reasons unknown, even to me, I made potato bread two days in a row. I made the first two potato bread recipes listed in The New Complete Book of Breads : Sister Jennie’s Potato Bread (p 360) and Potato Bread (p 363).\par
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My conclusion? The crust of Sister Jennie’s Potato Bread was a lovely golden brown, and the texture was softer than normal white bread. However, it has 1/2 cup of sugar in it, which made it noticeably sweeter than most regular white breads. If you like your white bread sweet, that’s great, but I think my tastes have been changing with the lean breads I’ve been attempting, and the bread was more sweet than I would’ve liked. So the next day I used my leftover mashed potato and reserved potato liquid and made the next recipe called simply “Potato Bread.” It called for the dough to be made into two different shapes: one regular loaf, and one braided loaf. (Judah asked yesterday morning if he could have some of that “pretty bread” so I felt vindicated in having gone to the extra effort to shape it more elaborately, even though I considered skipping that step) I don’t know exactly how it would’ve turned out had I made it correctly. Unfortunately, although it called for only 2 T. sugar, I forgot to put any in at all, and the salt flavor predominated. Interestingly, the crust was much, much, lighter than the first loaf with the higher sugar content. Even without the sugar, I think I liked the regular Potato Bread better, since it wasn’t as sweet, but at this point my decision on potato bead is this:\par
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The potato might change the crust and the texture a little, but it doesn’t add or detract much from the flavor of the bread. I really couldn’t take a bite and tell you whether it had potato in it or not. And in that case, why go to the trouble of cleaning, cutting up, boiling, skinning, and mashing the potatoes? But you never know. Perhaps the next recipe in the book “Potato Starter White Bread” will change my mind.

One is much more likely to report one’s successes than one’s failures.\par
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However, I feel compelled to admit to the world (or the 5 or 6 people who read my blog, anyway!) that I have recently had a rather spectacular failure in the realm of breadbaking.\par
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I wanted to learn a good recipe for rye bread that I could make regularly. In the bread cookbook that I borrowed from the library there was a rye recipe that especially intrigued me because it involved… you guessed it.. a starter! Well, actually a sponge, I think. Anyway, you mix up some of flour, water, caraway and all of the yeast and let it sit for 6 hours to 3 days. Naturally, I opted for 3 days. When the day arrived to finish the dough and bake it, it was too hot. So I put the sponge in the freezer. I’ve read that you can do this. However, in this situation, it did not work. I made the bread on Friday (even though it was hot.. I just couldn’t wait any more to try it!), and, well, you could kill a man with bread that dense and hard. It was sweet and tasted strongly of rye, but the texture was such that I didn’t even want to eat a whole slice of it. So… I guess I’ll try it again during a cool spell this summer, or in the fall – without freezing it!