The Occasional Chef

I had heard them all.  All the discouraging but well-meant things about making bread at home, having to wait and let dough rise, flour everywhere, needing a dough hook and a stand mixer, and getting better than a good workout. "Baking is difficult."  "Baking is tricky."  "Ooh, baking bread, you really gotta know what you're doing!" This kept me away, which is unusual.  The more esoteric a process and its arcane methods, the better by me.  At some point in the last couple years, I REALLY got tired of paying too much for a loaf of decent bread.  Stores sell a lot of good-looking breads, and especially so, in their store bakeries.  How many times have you been all amped-up for a gorgeous sandwich you made at home on one of these breads?  You're thinking, "I don't need to go to a restaurant.  I could be a chef!  Just look at this thing!"  The lettuce is bright green and offset by gleaming orange cheese and a blistering red tomato sl...

I knew it.  When I was at the store the other day, I said to myself that I'd get flour when I make my "real " grocery trip... certainly not now.  I was only picking up a few things.  So finally I got around to making my next loaf, and sure enough, I only had just over a cup of flour.  So much for efficiency.  My internal dialog of justifications is such a pain in the butt sometimes.  As Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."   I need bread.  I'm tired of eating potatoes and rice for my starch component.  I can't make a ham sandwich on crackers or potato slabs (I mean, I could). I have been experimenting with my bread recipe, tweaking it for lean times such as these.  Do I really need 4 cups of flour?  Can I make up for a reduction in diastatic power with something else or get by without it? Well, I had gotten some mixed sorghum-rice-millet flour a while back to cut into my...