Circumstances under which you began to make bread

I was a mid  20’s mom of two toddlers. Saw a BH&G magazine at the Chapel Hill married student’s  housing laundromat while washing diapers . There was an article with photos of a 10 yr old boy in FL pulling a wagon around his neighborhood selling his homemade Challah . He gave the money to a charity. The article contained his recipe. I started making it and moved on from there. I still make that Challah. Can’t find the magazine article it’s gotten lost . Still make all the bread we eat and give it to friends and neighbors. 

Nice thread. 🙏

Became convinced that plant-based was best for me. Lots of colourful veges and legumes. No cans, careful about the plastics, reduce the salt. That meant home made soy milk. Even the baked beans from scratch. Sweeping changes, made one at a time, that have stuck. It's been 20+ years.

At some point our bread got on my radar... and I found a copy of Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. My husband made a big thick steel plate to fit our oven. And I found I loved doing it. Wholemeal, with extra gluten and a good dose of seeds and oats in every loaf. Every day. For years.

Then, as I said in my intro post, covid disappeared the flour and the only bread we could buy was white rubbish - so we stopped eating bread. I took the steel out of the oven. And forgot about it.

A couple of months ago I saw a cast iron cloche in an Aldi catalogue. No matter that it was already cold and dark outside, we live rural and it's a long way to the nearest store, leaving immediately meant I could get there before closing time. I got the green one. :-)

I've discovered chakki atta flour can be bought in 10kg bags (I especially like Gingin Mill brand because it's almost local) which helps with the gnawing fear of running out of flour... I'm really enjoying the challenge of figuring out how to make fluffy-ish bread with it.  Sourdough. And still add in the seeds and oats.

During the summer of 1964 on one very rainy day, I was helping my mum in the kitchen by stirring some Mulberry jelly on the hob. We finished up canning the jelly and mum said she had to make some bread… I had never helped with making bread before (I was too young to even see over the countertop), so I stuck around and we made a wonderful loaf of cinnamon swirl bread together with the help of an old Sunbeam stand mixer. 

That sparked something in me that day… After that, I always wanted to hang out in the kitchen and help mum (and grand mum when we visited) with prep and stirring the pots and pans. I read recipe books and helped out where I could, as mum worked two full-time jobs during my childhood. (My parents divorced when I was still in my nappies). 

Almost everything was made from scratch… We grew a lot of our food in a backyard garden and when I got older, hunting and fishing helped fill the freezer. If mum bought bread, it was at the day old bread store and was bought from the “back tables” where the unsold (near week old) bread was held just before it went in the rubbish bin. 

As a result, I never cared for that stale bread from the day old store. I did however, love freshly made bread! Making bread was a big reason why I started helping in the kitchen so much and by the time I was eight years old, I could hold my own in the kitchen with most cooking chores. 

A few years later, I could cook complete dinners by myself. As a result, the work load on mum was reduced and I grew up early I suppose… My grand mum was very supportive of my interest in cooking as well and she always took the time to teach me everything I needed to master different dishes and foods.

They were two very special ladies that set me on a culinary path that has continued to grow for many decades! 

Cheers!


 

I can remember when I went all in on bread (just about 2004). But I don't exactly remember why. I had made fresh bread from frozen or store bought dough, and mixed a few of my own. Tried a bread maker. Nothing really sparked, except for the love of the taste of fresh bread. I could devour it, but it didn't translate to a desire to really get into the craft. 

I think I ran across a book on ancient sourdough (I don't have it any more...downsizing) and I guess I just went all in. Built a starter, bought a mixer, bannetons, a stone and all the rest. I found TFL about the same time. I've been hooked ever since. Mainly I make sourdough based breads, but veer off once in a while for bagels or quick breads. 

I really like the blending of science and chemistry, building formulas, and producing something very useful in the end. 

A long time ago early in my first marriage I somehow learned some basics of baking bread.  It might have been from the Joy Of Cooking. I started baking yeasted pan loaf breads and they seemed so much better than store breads that I baked most of our breads for several years.
Then life happened - major moves, divorce, job changes, and so on. After about 30 years, I rediscovered bread baking and this time I created a sourdough culture and began making sourdough sourdough bread too. Eventually I retired and was able to use schedules that would never fit with a day job.  I've been baking bread ever since.

Now that I've found The Fresh Loaf I've become more experimental and adventurous. I hope that happens for you, too.

TomP

So, I always knew how to do it (at least, thought I did until I found TFL). I'd occasionally make white or half whole wheat loaves when the kids were kids. Got serious about it before covid, because I was looking for flour that I had already been buying. Somebody on a knitting forum mentioned Japanese milk bread and that's what did it. After-covid inflation was the nail in the coffin. The price of bread (and everything in Canada is more expensive than the US) was too much, so I started making all the bread, bagels, English muffins, crumpets, hamburger, hotdog and sub buns.

I'm peculiar, though, in that I like store bread (and don't like whole wheat). I like that "white rubbish", as Amanda calls it 😁.  The softer, the better. My goal all along has been to duplicate the bread products grocery stores sell. The closer to store-bought it is, the more successful I consider it. Of course, it is still additive and chemical free, so all round better.

While I grew up in a home where Mom baked bread regularly, I never made bread while still living in my parents' home.  My introduction to baking as a kid were things like cookies or brownies or cakes or such.  

As a typically cash-strapped married student at university, any way to minimize spending was a godsend.  Baking bread was cheaper than buying it.  Consequently, when my wife became pregnant and was nearly constantly nauseous, I wound up handling much of the cooking and baking responsibilities.  With the Betty Crocker cookbook in hand and memories of Mom baking bread, I took my first wobbly steps into the world of bread.  Oddly enough, the bread turned out fairly well, so I kept baking.

That initial start morphed into me being the primary bread baker for our family.  There were probably half a dozen breads that I made regularly, none of them sourdough.  

Somewhere along the line, (2005, I think), I found TFL.  That opened a whole new world of breads, of techniques, of tools, of possibilities. My baking has become much more varied as a result and my skills have expanded.  And I'm still having fun with bread,

Paul

Oh man. I think my first exposure was watching reruns of Laura Calder's French Food at Home on cable. I was so obsessed with the show. I think that was around 2010. One day she made no knead bread. As a former full time white rice eater, crusty bread was so foreign to me. Closest thing I knew was rubbery mass produced baguettes I would never eat voluntarily.

Then there was a show called "Taste with Jason", a show about Chinese food culture in Malaysia. There was an episode about a French trained Chinese-Malaysian baker on the show, how he struggled to asimilate crusty breads into Malaysian culture (with all respect, it should be no brainer. Southeast Asian pantry staples are not designed for plain crusty bread...). Later on I got hooked with everything King Arthur Flour, trying their recipes. It was fun.

In the past I mainly baked to help navigating first few years of my bipolar disorder (God knows those years are quite rollercoaster😆) I found baking is both soothing and low stake activity. Along the way I tried so many different interests, but keep on coming back to baking!

I only started a little over a year ago, so I'm wildly inexperienced compared to most folks here!  I'd made bread very infrequently before that point, but at the end of 2023 I started a total diet and lifestyle overhaul and switching to all whole grains was a big part of that.

In 2024 I started making quick breads with 50/50 barley and whole wheat.  That's a mix I want to revisit at some point, I remember it being quite tasty.  After a few batches I started thinking about how much I prefer yeast bread.  So I tried to make a yeast bread with half barley flour.  I'm sure folks here can imagine the results.

I set myself to figuring what went wrong and learned about the necessity and function of gluten in wheat breads.  From there I started making 100% whole grain wheat breads and haven't looked back.  I was pretty take-it-or-leave-it with bread before, usually only had it a few times a month, but now it's probably my favourite food to eat.

Experimenting with recipes and the process is the part I enjoy most.  Fortunately I'm also tolerant to eating the, shall we say, unfortunate results, because I sure am discovering many ways to get those!

TFL has been an invaluable resource as I learn.  I really appreciate all the folks who have contributed.

I only started making bread consistently and successfully since new years 2024, so I'm still quite new to this (as I mentioned in my introductory post). It has been a really fun journey ever since, getting to try all kinds of bread foreign to me, esp. from the European bread traditions (I'm from SEA). 

I've baked bread a few times before this as a kid, the first is because I saw saw a video from TKOR on Youtube (Rest in Peace Grant Thompson). I was intrigued by how simple it sounded (flour+water+salt), and gave it a spin. I didn't really continue from that though, but my siblings continued on with their bread making journey. A few years later I decided to make hardtack because it sounded simple and fun, plus I like history a lot. Then I learned that you can make bread using the same ingredients, plus yeast, and it spiraled from that, I made myself a starter in Feb 2024 and found this website shortly after. I usually quit other interests but I withered out the early plateau and I'm really glad that I stayed around.

This website has really been a treasure find for me, I cannot count the many hours I have spent on this website, so, many thanks to the amazing community here!

45 years ago I bought a house in the boonies near the Oregon Coast. It was way too remote to run into town whenever you needed bread so I started making my own. At first it was hand kneaded white, and not bad. Then I found Bernard Clayton's book and soon after that Joe Ortiz's Village Baker. I've (?) progressed though using a Cuisinart, a Kitchen Aid and a bread machine. 

20 years ago I discovered The Fresh Loaf. In the 'old days' there were many wonderful bakers working out how to make sourdough starters and sourdough breads and I learned along with them. I now make 3 hand kneaded, sourdough loaves of varying compositions every 10 days, give away one and eat two. I seldom post my results because I can't work out how to post photos on TFL but I give thanks to Floyd every week.