Well, hell (nearly a year later)

Being the addict that I am, I occasionally succumb to wheat bread lust and drop a couple slices of store bought white bread in the toaster in the delusional hope they will make the outsides of a bacon cheese burger worth the clogged head and the following near coma that wheat bread is for me. Delusional is the keyword.

During the warm seasons I can avoid wheat, mostly. But once the air becomes chill the urge to play with flour, heat the house by way of the oven and fill our lives with the fragrance of bread overwhelms me. Even our son, who suffers the wheat allergy more so than I, has asked when I will bake bread again. He doesn't eat my bread, though his wife snatches loaves and sneaks off to their apartment to nibble at them like some hording hamster. He just wants to inhale their fragrance as it reminds him of how things were in his early childhood when mom and dad had life under control and he was mostly safe and free to do as he pleased.

So between the urge to bake and a son's request followed by his wife's need to nibble, how can I not break out the bread books and start building?


This bread was a "white" bread recipe I added yogurt to in place of milk. It also has a large egg yolk and a 1/4 cup of European style butter in it. I didn't care for the result, though my FIL says it's the best bread I've ever brought him. DIL seized the half loaf I had left on the cutting board and ran off muttering "Precious. My precious." Women are so strange.

A second bread recipe was made with yogurt added to give it a less sweet taste. It was such a flop I didn't bother to take pictures of it. Our three dogs all but inhaled that bread. Which reminds me of something a friend once told me. "You're breads are delicious. You're too picky about them. Just enjoy each for what it is."

But I can't. To accompany my wheat addiction is a streak of perfectionism. In damned near every other aspect of my life I settle of mediocrity. But bread? I'm my son's father and I too recall those childhood days of bread in the oven, steaming on a cooling rack, sliced hot so butter melted as it was spread and all the world was safe and mine.