Breads

This past weekend I made honey oatmeal bread as part of the weekly menu offering.  I love making this bread.  The oatmeal is cooked first and left to sit for 20 minutes.  Then one by one ingredients are combined until the final additions of the oatmeal and honey are made.  Two rises of the dough are completed and then they are popped into the oven in mini-loaf pans.

I like making bread in mini-loaves.  For one things, it's easier to share with many people that way, since everyone gets a small but significant portion in a single loaf.  For another, it's just cool to slice up a mini-loaf and eat it all up.  I don't know why.  But it is.

I even get the feeling that the bread tastes slightly different than in a larger loaf.  I've not collected any empirical data to support that.  But it's how it seems to me.

Breads in general are great, aren't they?  And they are so complex and simple at the same time.  Temperature and humidity in the kitchen have a effect on your breads that can be tricky to deduce ahead of time.  I've heard of people who specialize in making nothing but breads talk about how even they sometimes don't account properly for day-to-day changes in temperature and humidity which makes today's bread making process a little different than yesterday's.  It's a hard thing to quantify on a day-by-day basis.  And that makes bread making tricky and amazing, I think.  

The action of yeast in creating the texture and the flavor.  The affect of the ambient environment.  Whether you spray water into your oven or not (unless you have a professional bread oven with steam injectors).  The kind of flour used.   There are so many things which affect the final loaf of bread that is pulled from the oven.

It's easy to see why some people spend a lifetime just honing their bread-making skills and instincts.  I'd like to do that, too, but there are so many other things I always want to make that there is no way I could focus exclusively on bread.  I'm glad some do because the rest of us can learn from their experiences and techniques.