We made bread!




Yes, quite. But after spending two weeks in Britain after three entire years away and realizing that Whitney's doughnut recipe is now actually better than Tesco's, I was filled with a new determination that the things that I miss the most can't be created by black magic (though come to think of it, this is the only rational explanation for Marmite) and they must be replicable by some human recipe. Bread is one of the most basic building blocks of modern life imaginable, and yet you can't get anything like British supermarket bread here. For people in America, it is very difficult to explain what's actually different about it (try to imagine bread, except... slightly better) - Canadian white bread actually comes the closest, but it's still nowhere near as substantial as the stuff that I used to know.

So we tried using this recipe, and after about a day of following the recipe (which is mostly of letting it sit around), we got some nice results - I don't think that you could quite build houses out of these loaves, but we at least got something approaching the kind of texture that you'd expect from a bag of Kingsmill. You can see it slightly better in the photo in the recipe than the one here - the texture is less... airy than bread here, while at the same time being soft. Perhaps "spongy" is an unappetizing but almost appropriate word - possibly helped by the way that the recipe contains a surprising quantity of sugar and butter (apparently I had really been eating toasted cake all my life).

The experiments are continuing.