Hello Folks!

Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate this site.

Every now and then I'd gotten the urge to bake bread, I'd get out one of my otherwise trusty cookbooks and choose a likely candidate and proceed to make something that I could build a house out of. Being discouraged that I'd made something fairly wretched, and that I didn't have the time to make enough of them to actually build a house from (being a lemons to lemonade sort of fellow) I'd throw my hands up and abandon the attempt. But still the urge would come (usually years later).

Anyway, this time I was at work, so I looked about online, and came across this site. With rekindled hope, I studied for a week, picked up a copy of BBA and between the book and this site, just this last weekend made my first successful bread! Three lovely loaves of ciabatta. It didn't have the nice crumb one looks for in a ciabatta (though there were hints that it was thinking about it... I think I manhandled it a bit too much when I was dividing up the loaves) and they certainly weren't the prettiest things, but they were quite tasty, and had a great texture.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, and giving me what I needed to know to make my first right steps (after many missteps). Count me as yet one more addicted home baker.

Jaleister