When posted that I baked a loaf of cement I got a lot of advice. (Including a great deal which was not recorded in text / comments but delivered in person. The personal advice came in sentences that began with “Curmudgeon you dumbass… you should have done it like this…” You know who you are!)
While mostly very helpful, some advice was based on the erroneous impression that I’m a helpless schmuck. Indeed one could be forgiven for thinking I’m one of those gutless beta males who are typecast as the dad in every breakfast cereal commercial. You know the commercials I’m talking about. The ones where a trophy wife and a six year old laugh at the antics of a male who somehow can’t make breakfast without either setting the toaster on fire or getting heart disease? Fortunately, that is not me.
I don’t cook but I do manufacture. I manufacture reasonably well actually. When it comes to manufacture of bread I’m not totally helpless.
To repeat… when necessary I can bake the living shit out of a loaf of bread. I own it. I dominate the bread and make it do my bidding. Does this mean I can make flan? No. If I want flan I’ll damn well buy it. (Or possibly invade the country where it comes from.)
I just wanted to make the point that I can venture into the kitchen without getting the vapors from accumulated estrogen. In fact I’ll refer to my series I like to call “bread baking advice for men and creatures that think like them“. This series was based on bread that had nothing to do with a bread machine. (I started with wheat berries and went from there… is that not the full Monty?)
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread 0: Class Prerequisite
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread I: Motivation
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread II: Workspace
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread III: Equipment
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread IV: Consumables
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread V: Flour
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread VI: Mixin’ Stuff
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread VII: Paydirt
- Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread VIII: Tips
Behold what I have wrought!
That was then and this is now. The task at hand had to do with the use of purchased bread mix and whether I could combine it with my trusty bread machine to make bread with slightly less effort than breathing. Experiment one in that vein was a failure. Stay tuned for experiment two, the bread race.