A Bread Lifestyle?

A friend popped by for a visit the other day. As she entered the big kitchen, she sniffed appreciatively and asked what I was baking. I said bread. That's when things got interesting.
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"Oh, that makes sense, goes with your lifestyle." She said, kind of offhandedly if not downright dismissively. Made me want to look down to make sure I had shoes on and no bun in MY oven. It also kind of confused me, any real bread maker or homesteader would cringe at the way I 'make' bread. I'd be scorned, I'm sure.

Way back when bread machines were new, we bought one. At the time, we were living in a very congested, urban suburb of Vancouver. Not quite the homesteading/farm/back-to-the-land Lifestyle but any stretch of the imagination. But my mom (Eileen) made bread when I was a kid and I loved the smell and taste of homemade bread.The yearning a comforting memory carries was not the only motivation, of course. The taste of warm fresh bread certainly had something to do with it. But mostly we were thinking that making our own would be more nutritious and cheaper. It turned out the bread machine was great. Dump in the ingredients, hit start and that was that. House smelled great and the bread tasted greater. We saved money, knew exactly what was in our bread, and man, did it make the house smell wonderbar!

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After 11 years or so the bread machine gave up the ghost. It had a lot of issues by that time, some age-related and some not. I think me banging on the pan sides with a knife to loosen a stubborn loaf probably had something to do with it. At any rate we decided to get a new one 'free' with airmiles (yeah, I know just another sales gimmick but there's so many of them, it's hard to resist them all).

It turns out bread machines had changed a lot in a decade. Special flour, special yeast, special this, special that, all designed to work with bread machines specifically. And all costing way more than the regular stuff. I've got to admit, one of my pet peeves is this whole 'specialized item market' that has emerged. I figured I always used the regular stuff and my bread was fine. So that's what I did. And the results were awful. Ew. They were very nice oversized hockey pucks though, but I didn't have much of a use for them. The price of the 'bread machine' stuff was so high that it really deterred me from buying it. Besides, I could go to the bakery and pay about the same as making it and the whole point of making bread in the first place was to save money.

So the spanking new bread machine reposed on my kitchen counter, all shiny and metallic. It's LED display and little tiny computer innards wasting away. It was probably gloating, "Ha, Ha, you got me 'free' but I'm too expensive to use, Ha, Ha, Ha, SUCKER!" Then I had a brain storm. I'd mix up the dough and let the machine do the kneading. I can't really knead well on account of my shoulder. I fell off a ladder in the chicken coop last winter and my shoulder has never forgiven me. So now I mix up the dough using a free standing mixer, throw it in the bread machine to knead, let it rise and toss it in the oven. Any 'real' bread maker would be appalled. I'm sure I have ancestors who made bread ~properly~ now spinning in their graves.

So the way I make bread has nothing to do with the homestead or farm or back-to-the-land or whatever the lifestyle term is for what I'm doing. I simply had a perfectly good machine squatting in my kitchen and it was driving me nuts. Hhmm, may-be that is a lifestyle, one that has nothing to do with where one lives.