I don't know if anyone else felt this as much as I did, but I noticed over the course of the year that bread prices in New York have really shot up. Part of the pain is the result of being much pickier about bread than I used to be. When I went on the no-sugar kick last January, I started getting much more assiduous about reading labels. To my dismay, I found that commercially produced bread often contains a shocking amount of sugar in various forms, including molasses, honey, brown sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other types of sugar that I can't even pronounce, much less remember. A nutritionist friend told me that three grams of sugar (preferably the naturally-occurring kind) per serving is a good benchmark generally to support the larger goal of keeping processed sugar to a minimum, so I set that as my maximum standard for staying within the rules of the no-sugar challenge.
Good luck finding commerically produced bread that fits that standard, by the way. It's not impossible, but it's tough.
In an effort to solve the bread dilemma, I found that many artisan breads contain relatively little sugar. The problem, however, is that they're expensive - often four dollars or more per loaf. Yikes! I shelled out for it, though. I found that once I was over the first three weeks of complete and total misery from sugar cravings, the periods between cravings began to lengthen and I felt a lot better while they lasted.
Once the job situation began to look unpleasant a couple of months ago, I took a long, hard look at everything I was spending and started making cutbacks so I could pump up my emergency fund. At that point, I decided that I could no longer justify really expensive bread. At the same time, however, I didn't want to go back to the stuff with all the sweeteners in it.
Well, what do you do when you're between a rock and a hard place?
Thanks to the internets, I started learning how to bake.
The first five tries were dismal failures. They came out somewhere between sponges and bricks, and they were in no way delicious. I've always been one to eat my kitchen mistakes, though, on the grounds that I hate wasting food, and that figuring out what went wrong through eating my mistakes might help me learn what not to do next time.
I kept refining as I went, and the sixth try turned out to be the charm: For once, the bread turned out to be genuinely good.
So did the sevenh.
So did the eighth.
By the eighth, I was experimenting with throwing in things like garlic and rosemary, or pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I've also found that making bread is a wonderful way of connecting with the memory of my grandmothers, who I'm sure would have laughed themselves silly at my first few attempts. Now I'm baking once a week or once every two weeks. Aside from the fact that it's a real pleasure to be able to produce bread at about a quarter of the price of artisan bread in the grocery store, I can't help feeling a stupid sense of real accomplishment every time I do it and it doesn't suck.
A few things I learned by doing:
--Bread does take time, but most of that time goes towards waiting for it to rise. If you plan your time well, it fits in nicely with other things.
--As long as you have strong hands, you don't need a breadmaker.
--A tablespoon of honey is plenty to activate a packet of yeast, and it works out to far less than three grams of sugar per slice.
--Yeast is cheaper when bought in jars instead of packets.
--One way to keep bread from sticking to loaf pans is to coat the pans with olive oil and then a layer of flour.
--Don't try the bread when it's just out of the oven, unless you planned to chow down on half a loaf all along. (Yes, I've done this. More than once.)
--Recommended baking temperatures don't seem to work well in my oven. I put it up to 375 instead of 350, with much better results.
--Bread goes stale in about three days. I cut each loaf in half and keep half in the freezer until I want to use it.
--You can't use all whole wheat flour without something called dough starter. I haven't graduated to dough starter yet, so I'm sticking to a roughly 50-50 mixture bewteen white and whole wheat.
Does anyone else bake their own bread here? Why or why not? Do you have any other recent culinary adventures to share?
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