I baked bread.....

...from scratch!

I have always loved the art of baking. Not that i do much of it. But i feel there is something very satisfying AND humbling to spend effort blending a variety of ingredients together and then allowing a process to take over to create the end-product (that may or may not be close to what you had originally thought about). The only thing that i could manage in the oven until recently is vegetable au gratin...not that you can ever go wrong with it thanks to all the cheese and white sauce that can make anything seem like a gourmet dish!

Finally thanks to the experimentation of one friend and the enthusiasm of another, I decided to bake bread at home. And a super-healthy one at that! So in went the wheat flour, the jagery, the oil, the yeast. Lot of patient kneading. Garlic-onion-sun dried tomatoes flavouring for one set and methi-corn combination for the other. This followed by lot of patient waiting for the yeast to do its magic. Flustered by tons of questions - was it 15 minutes or 20? or do we wait 2 hours thanks to the cold weather? Is it rising enough? You think we didn't put enough yeast? Maybe we should wait another 10 mins? Or maybe not? aaaaaargh! (Thank god i was in this with another friend - couldn't have handled this agony of not knowing all by myself)

At last, ready for the final act. Out came the greased loaf tins, in went the dough into the oven. Some more patient waiting made worthwhile with the wonderful smell of bread wafting through.

20 minutes of anticipation and out came the hot bread. 30 minutes of more anticipation waiting for the loafs to cool down. And finally the moment that made all this labour worth the while - the cutting and tasting of bread....ah!

The final result - the crust nice and brown, the sides not too bad. Unfortunately the middle had bits of uncooked dough - not so soft and porous. So after hours of all that effort half-baked bread was what we savoured!

But hey who cares?! All that matters is I BAKED BREAD FROM SCRATCH! And i am all set to try it again :)