Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Some of those bread people really scare me...

I'll admit I'm obsessed with baking. I mean, who spends hours on the web, surfing from site to site, drooling over a perfectly blistered golden crust, the insanely buttery cookie, if they're not crazy. If there was such a thing as the smellovision equivalent for computers and even one bread site used it, I'd sign up tomorrow even if it cost a fortune. There are a ton of blogs about food, many about baking in particular, but some of the bread-only people can be scary to the point of making me want to festoon myself with garlic.

I'm not going to name names but when you get a posting thread that goes on for days that debates the merits of one percentage of hydration vs. another, I realize that the denizens of this particular website live on a different plane of reality than mine. These guys are SERIOUS about bread and there is no room for error when calculating percentages of ingredients or discussing grinds of flour (yes, there is the subculture of grinding your own wheat that plays in this too - eek! - but I'm not even going down that road)

Yes, I know there is science to baking and my refusal to pay much attention to that has led to some of my more spectacular failures but really, I mostly like to bake because I like to eat. The serious bread people don't seem to be having much fun with the whole thing and I don't hear a lot of discussion about how good the stuff tastes, which is the point, I thought. At any rate, I get slightly creeped out when bread stops being food and starts being just an experiment. It all seems a bit Soylent Green (I hope I spelled that right - the movie came out a LONG time ago) to me.

Its snowing here in the mountains and the kids are agitating for me to bake cookies. One wants peanut butter, the other chocolate chip so I'm off to wing it and attempt to make something that satisfies them both. As long as nothing explodes it'll be a success as far as I'm concerned.

1 comment:

Phoebe said...

I think you should write a book on something--anything! You have a great way with words, that's just so darn entertaining. I got it, it sort of reminds me of reading Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat, Pray, Love.

Love your blog!

Phoebe