Bake a Loaf

Last night, spurred by my parental duty to help Skylar with her Science Fair project -- she's studying yeast -- I made my very first loaves of bread. We worked together, of course, but a few delays in the process and her exhaustion made it necessary for me to take over from the dough mixing stage onward. I can honestly say that the phenomenon cookbooks describe, whereby the process of producing homemade bread leads to a profound sense of well being, hit me with a force I did not expect. Even if the loaves had turned out inedible, the sheer joy of watching the dough rise would have been enough to give me a serious emotional boost. But they came out pretty tasty, if a little denser and wider than I was hoping.

This brings me to my motivation for sharing this with you. If you have recipes for making yeast bread that you find particularly stellar or tips that have proven useful over the years, Skylar and I would be most grateful to benefit from your knowledge. The loaves we made last night were an attempt at baguettes, though insufficiently airy to meet a French standard. We're going to continue producing them for the course of the experiment, since we need to limit our variables, but will also try our hands at other kinds of bread. We also aim to make spontaneously leavened bread down the road, even if its creation seems too time-consuming and unpredictable for the Science Fair.