For the Love of Bread

Naomi Lee's Rich Loaf

I'm a lover of bread.  My husband jokes that all I eat are carbs. Well, it's pretty close to the truth.  We go shopping, and I have put 5 different kinds of bread in the cart within minutes of entering the store. But then we went to Germany... I was in heaven- bread heaven.  Fantastic bread everywhere we went, even the train stations. OMG! Heaven.  And I kept wondering why we don't have good bread here. I mean we have good bread here but NOTHING like Germany.  Why? Germans came here.

Well, in my family, my husband is the chef.  He's incredible.  He can go into a restaurant, eat something, and then come home and recreate it for us- usually ten times better!  But he doesn't bake bread.  He knows how, he's given me tons of tips, but it's not really his forte.  So unbeknownst to him I bought a book- Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads.  He took one look at the 2-inch thick tome and cast a dubious glance my way.  He thinks I don't have follow-through.  He knows he's the one who does the cooking.  But after my first loaf came out of the oven, he was a convert.  He told me he wants me to make one of every recipe in the book.  And so I have embarked on a bread baking adventure.  I started out trying to make one of every loaf going through the book, but like a kid in a candy store, I got distracted by an upcoming loaf and had to dash forward.  So now I'm kind of working my way through the book in a slightly meandering way, and I've picked up another book to work my way through as well.  Our cupboards are now full of a variety of flours- all purpose, bread, wheat, rye, barley, soy, and rice.  And we're likely to get more as I delve deeper into my bread books.