Making Peace

Making peace is always a lengthy progress and not always straight forward. But in the end, it must be said it’s well worth it.

“I have to admit that recently, I had been at war with my bread baking skills. I was reaching a point where I was almost considering not doing bread any more. The problem is, I’m not really good at following recipes. Blindly, that is. I like recipes as an inspiration and a rough guide. But I also like to understand why things should be done in a certain way or why things react the way they do. Only when I understand the reasons will I be able to apply them regardless the recipe, right?”

Baking is a complicated process and it’s different from cooking. Changing measures doesn’t just mean it will taste different but it means that certain reactions might simply not happen. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to experiment, it only means that the trial & error approach will most likely produce a lot of error in the beginning…

“Luckily, I did find a well written recipe that was actually explaining some details. What difference it makes when a dough is wet or dry. What actually happens to the gluten when you knead the dough. It was still a bit too complicated to follow (because it was rather precise about times… like folding the dough every 30 minutes over a period of 4 hours.. who has that much time?) and I had to modify the amounts, too. But, it turned out pretty good. So, I needed to ‘negotiate’ the peace I was seeking for a bit more than a week (taking care of the sourdough starter), but it was well worth it!”