Breaking bread is obviously one of the oldest food traditions, if not THE oldest food tradition, and so I have always had visions of making homemade bread...in a woodfired oven, using cakes of yeast, waiting hours for it to rise and kneading the dough with my bare hands...like my ancestors. And this bread fantasy of mine was all well and good until I read the January/February issue of Cook's Illustrated. I learned that I can make homemade bread, without kneading, with rapid rise yeast and in a regular oven in under 2 hours, allowing me to move on and do something else and still have a house that smells like fresh baked bread goodness. Win/win!!



So today, while watching football, running, cleaning the house and watching the Golden Globes, after coming back from San Diego, I made bread! Let me just say my bread is good, but it is a little more dense than I think it was supposed to be. It has a great yeast bread flavor and it is brushed in butter so it also has a buttery crust which is nice, but I am just not so sure of the texture...and well I didn't get the top of my bread to look like a perfect dome, instead of an igloo style roof, my bread is more like a flat ranch style roof.

But let me share with you a few things I learned about bread from this article:

• The more yeast that is in the bread the faster the bread rises
• Adding more water to the bread enhances the gluten structure
• Gluten is a protein that forms when flour is combined with water. When you add yeast the gluten traps the gases that are released from the fermentation process, inflating the dough and causing it to rise (yup a little cooking science for you)
• The flavor in bread comes from the fermentation process