James Baker served as Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan and was later appointed Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration. I’m thinking about changing my name to James Baker Brewer because I have caught the baking bug.
I love to cook, but frankly don’t know a lot about the art of baking. I’m not even sure how to put those two “turny” things in the mixer. As a mater of fact, I don’t even know where they are because my wife Nancy hides them from me. Last time I tried to use the mixer, a good bit of what would have been a chocolate cake ended up on the ceiling.
But is there anything in this world that smells better than bread cooking in an oven?
We once had a bread machine, which I named “Mule.” I named it that because it was as stubborn as its namesake. Sometimes the damned thing worked and the next time it took the morning off despite a big glob of flour, butter, milk and yeast languishing from within.
Recently I decided I’d try again. I bought an Oster bread machine and I have since been baking away. Two of my recent successes were raisin bread and country white bread. They both smelled heavenly and tasted just as good. By the way, toast made from homemade bread is the absolute best. A big slab of bread toasted and oozing with butter along with a glass of cold orange juice makes a great breakfast by itself.
In my short baking career, I have come to find out that following instructions is relatively important to a successful end product. Because I did not precisely heed the advice from the baking manual, a couple of my batches did not fare so well.
On my first attempt with my new machine, I forgot to put the little flipper that kneaded the bread in the bottom of the bread pan and that was a costly mistake. On another failed baking attempt, I mistakenly pressed the 1.5-pound size selection when I should have entered instructions for the machine to bake a 2-pound loaf, but I’m new at this and still learning my craft.
Unless you have a bread machine, there is not much use in offering bread recipes, so I’ll give everybody a couple weeks to go out and buy one, then I’ll share some of my successful recipes.
In the meantime, as James Baker would certainly say, freshly baked, homemade bread is hard to beat.