I should be embarrassed at the hang-ups I’ve had about baking with yeast.  Considering this started out as a cooking and baking blog, there shouldn’t be any baking endeavor that frightens me – but yeast baking did.  I had one success years ago – light and flaky dinner rolls I made one Thanksgiving, which I kneaded to within an inch of their lives, thank you work stress.  But when I tried to make a full loaf of (no-knead!) bread, it came out as heavy and dense as a boulder, and I gave up.

Still, now and then I would feel inspired, and I’d resolve to try again and learn how to bake with yeast.  I’d put yeast baking onto New Year’s resolution lists or seasonal to-do lists (usually in the winter, because bread-baking seemed – still seems – like a lovely warm thing to do when the winds are howling outside, although now I know that hot summer rains are actually the best bread-baking weather, but we’ll get there).  A few months ago, my BFF, Rebecca, mentioned that she was feeding her sourdough starter.  Since I knew enough to know that she’d have to remove and throw away a chunk of the starter, I begged her to give it to me.  Obligingly, she dropped by later that evening with the starter packed in a glass container – my new pet, for which I had no idea how to care.  Oops.

The starter sat in my fridge, neglected, for weeks. Trying to be a responsible sourdough starter mom (and to return Rebecca’s glass storage container to her) I ordered a stoneware crock from King Arthur Flour, to be my baby’s new home.  I plopped it in, then neglected it some more.  By the time Rebecca poked her head into my fridge to look at my starter, it was looking pretty embarrassing.  But she assured me she’d seen worse, and that I could salvage it.  The next week, I took Peanut to a play date at the home of a new camp friend.  I stuck around, because I don’t know the family – and I totally hit it off with the other mom, especially after she told me she’d been teaching herself to bake bread for the past few weeks.  She proudly showed off her new Emile Henry bread pot (OMG WANT) and promised to share her recipe.  And I went home inspired.

It was hard, but I managed to restrain myself from running off to Williams-Sonoma and buying my own bread pot.  I didn’t want to spend the money ($130!) if my new bread-baking hobby was going to be – pardon the pun – a flash in the pan.  So I scouted around online for a recipe that didn’t require a Dutch oven or bread pot, and discovered that the basic sourdough recipe from King Arthur would work in my low-key little loaf pan.

And the result?  Not too shabby for a first try!  I was really pleased to see the golden crust and good rise.

The following week, my first bread-baking temptation struck, and struck hard.  Should I go get a bread pot, or a new loaf pan, or some baguette formers?  Should I try out a new recipe?  No, I told myself strictly, be good.  Stick to the basics, get a handle on this recipe, and you’ll have plenty of time to experiment and try other recipes.  Still, I wanted to do something different, so I grabbed a small handful of fresh herbs – chives and rosemary – out of my garden, minced them finely, and kneaded them into my dough.

Herbed sourdough gorgeousness!  I really don’t know what I was so afraid of – learning to bake sourdough has been a total joy so far.  I can’t wait to try out other breads and to get the kiddos involved as assistant bakers (not just eaters).

(You know it must be good, if the three-year-old approves herbed sourdough.)

Along the way, I’ve picked up a few tips, that aren’t in the recipe I’ve been using as my base:

• Fresh herbs take everything over the top.
• A longer rise never hurts.  The recipe calls for an hour rise; I like to give it a good 90 minutes.
• Similarly, a touch more kneading helps too.  The recipe calls for 7-10 minutes of kneading if using a stand mixer – which I do.  To make sure I get a good dough, I’ve been giving it 10 minutes in the mixer with the dough hook and another five minutes by hand, which the bread seems to appreciate.
• Another thing the recipe doesn’t call for, but which is key, is a shallow baking dish filled with water in the bottom of the oven during the baking process.  Hello, golden crust.
• Speaking of water, did you know bread likes humidity?  It turns out the best weather for baking is when there’s plenty of water in the air – like during a hot summer thunderstorm.  Who knew?  (Probably lots of people, but I didn’t know.)  Conversely, when I knead in front of the air conditioner, the dough is dryer and less pliable.  SCIENCE!
• The recipe I’ve been using calls for a lot of starter – double the amount (two cups) that most other recipes I’ve seen call for.  As a result, I’ve developed a feeding routine for my starter that yields a little bit more.  I take the starter out of the fridge a few hours before I’m planning to feed it.  When I’m ready to feed, I remove one cup and set it aside for use in the recipe.  Then I feed the starter, and a couple of hours later, I remove another cup of starter, bake the bread and feed the starter again before it goes back into the fridge.  Without this little dance, I’d be wiped out of starter after one loaf.

Is it obvious that I’m having a lot of fun?  Because I am – once I gave myself permission to make a bad loaf or two, the whole process got less scary and more exciting.  Now I want to learn everything there is to know about bread-baking; I feel like a whole world has opened up to me.  So much for the fear of yeast baking…

Do you bake bread?  What’s your favorite recipe?