I love to bake. One of the things that I used to bake a lot was bread. This was before I purchased a mixer with a dough hook and before I purchased a bread machine. No, I loved physically doing all of the work to bake bread. I had this bread book, How to Bake Bread and Stay Healthy, by Floss and Stan Dworkin, that had lots of recipes for me to work with.
At the height of my bread baking career, while I was living by myself, most of the breads that I made, I would share with others. It gave me the opportunity to make more breads, since each loaf got finished quicker.
One of the breads that I was known for was Challah. Challah bread for those of you that don’t know is a Jewish egg bread. In its traditional form it is braided before baking. Presently many Diners use it for making French toast. Generally each recipe made two loaves.
I had a great deal with a close friend of mine. I was always invited to his house when his family shared Thanksgiving. I made challah bread for his family to share. In exchange for this bread, his mother would always make an extra batch of chopped chicken livers (which I loved) for me. This deal went on for years.
There was one year however, that I was unable to make it to their feast because I had two tickets to an Islander hockey game on the same night. I had to come up with a strategy about the bread so that I wouldn’t leave my friend breadless (and me liverless). I decided that I would make the usual 2 loaves of bread, drop one off for his family before I left for the game and give the other to the woman I was going to take to the game to share with her family. I thought this would be a big hit on all sides.
Challah is an interesting bread. Of all of the breads that I make, it takes a while for it to rise. Usually I have to punch it down twice and let it rise for 2 hours, to get a good enough rise out of the dough for good bread. On this particular occasion I should have realized that something was wrong when the bread rose the first time, higher than it had ever done before.
To understand what had happened you need to know a little bit about what feeds yeast to help bread rise. The main ingredients are usually a liquid, flour and some sweetener. In this case the sweetener was ¾ cup of honey. Salt, which is added in bread, slows down the rising process. In this case, the recipe called for 4 tsp. of salt. I had forgotten to put the salt in the dough, hence the great and quick rise.
I dropped off the bread at my friend’s house and then took it to my date’s house. It was at her house that I had a piece of the bread for the first time, and realized right away what I had done. I was so embarrassed. The bread looked great but tasted very bland, not something that would show me off as a good baker. I apologized for the poor bread. She couldn’t really relate to it for she had nothing to compare it against. She had never eaten challah before. I didn’t go out on any more dates with this woman and I’m convinced that that tasteless bread had something to do with it. As for my friend’s Thanksgiving gathering, they did notice the difference from previous breads. He agreed with me about its taste, but as it turned out, his mother liked the bread better.
I continue to bake bread when I can, only now I have a bread machine, and a mixer with a dough hook. Even still, I never allow either machine to do the bread dough preparation or baking to completion. I still have to spend some time kneading the dough and baking it in my own pans. After all, I’m still the baker.
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