How the heck did I end up baking bread?

I've always felt comfortable with cooking--not necessarily good at it, but comfortable--but I never considered myself a baker. In fact, until I began baking bread a year and a half ago, the extent of my baking was throwing the specified ingredients in a hand-me-down Breadman bread-machine, because, well, we had it, and I'm a sucker for new gadgets, even if it's someone else's old gadget. The bread was ok, but it's only real appeal was that we were involved in the process. Unsurprisingly, we didn't use it very often, and I didn't care.

So, if you had told me in early November of 2014 that within two years I would own multiple bread books, which would live on my counter, and that I would be baking bread and be setting my alarm early enough to make sure I had time to feed a sourdough culture in the morning, I would have told you that you were crazy, especially regarding the getting up early part. But here I am, and I completely blame the sourdough. Not the bread--the culture.

Yes, that living microbial throng is the reason I am now a baker. I previously thought that "sourdough" was a flavor at best, and probably mostly a marketing thing. Instead, I saw the instructions for making your own sourdough culture in a book somewhere and thought, "Wow, that's a cool science experiment!" Just mix water and flour together, and stuff starts to happen! Before I knew it, I had a relatively large quantity of bubbling brew, and loathe to throw all of it away, I figured I ought to use it for something!

So, without bothering to look up a recipe, I just took some of the culture (I think it was in the 100% hydration range), added some more flour to make it seem more like dough (remember, I really haven't baked before), and threw it in the oven. I probably preheated the oven, but no salt, no proofing--nothing one generally considers an essential part of the leavened bread process.

Fortunately, I only made a small. . .thing. . . as it was as horrible as you might imagine. Looking back, I think I also used culture from an early stage in the development

This is the point at which I could have chalked it up as just another experiment, and moved on. But I couldn't! I didn't expect my experimental bread to be be any good, but I hadn't expected it to be so bad, and I had to figure out why. I at least had to try an actual recipe for sourdough bread. The first recipe I tried might have been from the book that introduced me to sourdough, but it also might have been the Extra-tangy Sourdough from the KAF website. The result was actually bread. Somehow, I had managed to conjure forth an actual loaf of bread! But it was still not particularly good--edible, but rather mediocre.

How could there be such mystery and challenge to taking such a simple seeming set of ingredients and forming it into such a simple seeming product? This mystery and challenge, combined with a certain strange affection for my starter culture, made me want to continue trying this baking thing, even though I still didn't care very much about bread itself!

So I kept baking, and little bit by little bit, got better at it, especially once I started getting books out of the library and learned more than just how to follow a recipe. My wife started liking the results, and I found a friend who also baked, and I found myself telling politely-disinterested people about bread, and realized that my scientific curiosity in micro-organisms had grown into bread-baking pleasure.

It's possible that it would have remained an occasional hobby, except that I took a chance on Flour Water Salt Yeast at the library one day. I can't say where FWSY stands in the pantheon of bread books, but for me, it was just what I needed. Something about the presentation, the method, the explanations, etc., just clicked, and almost overnight, I went from making decent bread to pretty good bread. For the last 6-9 months, I've been baking almost exclusively using FWSY recipes (err, formulas), or my own derivations. I've been very happy with the results, so I haven't felt much need to try other things, but I've also wanted to reach the point where I feel like I've internalized the method to some degree.

So, for me, the next step is to become more intentional about documenting what I do, as well as planning ahead some more. (With four young kids around, if I don't do advance planning, I'll have no choice but to do something familiar.) Since I like both gadgetry and writing, I thought that keeping a blog-diary of sorts would be a way of making this part of the process a bit more fun. My plan is to keep the finer details in a paper notebook on my counter, and then post a report of sorts to this blog.

[Edited due to prematurely submitting unfinished post]