Or make clothes, or build your own furniture, etc.
When I make bread, I don’t use a bread machine. I do use quick yeast because where I shop doesn’t seem to carry regular yeast. I do all the measuring, mixing adjusting kneading and what have you. Not because I need to. I don’t. I can get perfectly good, tasty, nutritious bread of almost any variety at any number of different markets in the area.
We don’t like to admit it, but bread making, as both art and science, has been pretty well mastered at large industrial scale.
We don’t generally need to bake.
I bake from time to time because it’s fun labor in small doses. When I bake it’s a party and there is rarely any bread left at the end. Good fun, food and friends.
Why do you bake, or garden, or make small wooden toys or whatever it is that you do that creates something?
Most of what I do as far as home crafts is about customization or refinement. Industrialization leads to standardization which results in one-size-fits-all, equally poorly. I like baking, but I started because I wanted better bread. And cooking? If you’re watching your sodium, pretty much every prepared food on the planet should have a “poison” label. I’m not big on sewing, but do that because most shirts leave room for someone with a bigger waist than me, etc.
I have an herb garden because it’s great in the summer to have all manner of fresh herbs ready for the picking, and it’s MUCH cheaper than buying the same in the store. There’s also no pressure to use anything right away as one would have to do with most cut herbs one would buy at the market. I also have some fruit-bearing plants, but I’d need a lot more of those to really supply us with most or all of the fresh fruit we like to eat. Still, they are not all that difficult to grow and it’s fun to have your own crops. Fresh raspberries right out of your own garden are the bomb - the ones at the store cannot compare.
I have been surprised by the fact that almost all commercially-made bread (the kind you get in the bread aisle in the grocery, not necessarily the stuff purchased in the deli area or at a bakery) has sugar in it. I don’t make a lot of bread but I do appreciate the ability to control the ingredients. I am at a point in my life where the less sugar I eat the better and it’s included in an awful lot of prepared stuff.
It’s fun, creative and satisfying to use your hands to craft things.
I did art and any manner of crafty things as a child.
It’s served me well over the years. I’ve been paid on occasion to create murals and do lettering.
I impressed my kids and now my grandkids with my abilities.
Because not every item needs to be the result of a money transaction. I get tired of the buy buy buy mandate and sometimes I just want to make things–especially when I’m repurposing something into some other use. I like to cook because I’m good at it and commercially prepared food is mostly garbage. I like to garden because it soothes and comforts me and I can try out a million different interesting varieties of veg and fruits not available to buy buy buy at every grocery store. Because I like to build things. Because the kind of clothes I like to wear aren’t always “in style” and therefore aren’t available unless I make them–and I don’t wear polyester fabric so even styles I might like to wear are quite often not available in natural fabrics so it’s just easier to make them out of the fabric I prefer. Because I can crochet a hat in a few hours out of lovely warm wool and it’s so much nicer and warmer than the crappy acrylic ones available to buy buy buy. Basically, so I can have things the way I like them.
My bagels and hamburger buns are better than anything I can buy here in the suburbs. And I can’t buy a boule within a half-hour drive, plus they’re kind of small
My rye and wheat breads are decent, so yes, I’m just making them because it’s fun.
Well, I was a baker (not a great one) several jobs ago, and I still like doing it from time to time. It’s simply enjoyable to apply your knowledge sometimes. When I do it right, it’s better than the commercial products available, even from the higher end bakeries. Even when I make a mistake, it’s still generally pretty damn tasty. Your failed bread usually still tastes amazing when it’s warm. When you do it right, it tastes great for days. I’ve fooled with doing chewy pretzels since I was a child, and the last set I did were the best I’ve ever had from anywhere. I’ll be returning to do them soon. I’ve even ordered a countertop oven with a proofing setting since I’ve got time to hang around for long rises while I’m working from home. I’m going to try Hokkaido milk bread when it gets here.
I’ve successfully done all kinds of leavened bread, and doing so with sourdough recently has taught me some patience, which is a trait I’d like to enhance. If anything makes me sad about my baking, it’s that I still can’t make tortillas of the quality that Angel Rodriguez’s mom served me when I was a tot. I’ve made edible corn and flour tortillas, but they weren’t these. Hers were even better than the ones from Central Market. The ones I ate were always made the night before, paper thin, fluffy and stretchy at the same time, and just a little carbonized in spots from being reheated on the gas range one at a time in just a few seconds before she filled them with eggs and bacon. She knew secrets that I’ll probably spend the rest of my life unsuccessfully trying to unlock.
Hehehe, and after posting I re-read the OP and realized it was more general than baking.
Umm, most of the time I do things like make furniture, home repair, fix my own car, or other things that I am otherwise unqualified to do: it’s usually a nexus of “I can’t afford/don’t want to pay for that!”, or I’d prefer to have the adventure. I could pay someone to fix my sprinkler system, or I could shut it off, read up, and try to repair it. If it takes more than a couple of days, I can schlep a sprinkler around the yard while I figure it out. If I get bored or it doesn’t seem I can fix it, I’ll call in the professionals and take any extra charges and humiliation for the damage I’ve done so far.
I like to bake just because it’s like a little magic trick each time, with some alchemy thrown in. You mix these different things together in a bowl, it magically gets much larger, then you put it in a heating device, where it somehow turns from a sticky blob into a lovely, crusty substance that smells like you hope heaven smells.
Not baking of course, but I spent all day Saturday tending to my smoker. And produced racks of baby back ribs and a brisket that were, in a word, heavenly. It was a family gathering and the opinion that I surpassed the flavor of any known restaurant was unanimous. Ditto for my own homemade potato salad and sauces. I’ve also experimented a bit and have concocted a smoked macaroni and cheese dish that is amazing (yes, I slow-cook it in the smoker).
I realize I’m biased, but am getting a lot of agreement from guests too. In these cases my food is much better. So I prefer making it myself.
Nothing compares to fresh-baked bread, right out of the oven. No matter how fancy that bread is you get from the grocery store, it won’t compare to fresh-baked.
I split the difference, though. Instead of making my own dough, I get the frozen loaves of dough, and bake them at home. Almost as good as completely homemade, but much less time.
And while the commercial kitchens have gotten very good at a lot of things, there are some things they haven’t. Like soups. Any canned soup you find at the grocery store has no flavor whatsoever other than salt (of which it has way too much). The low-sodium varieties, when you can find them, have no flavor at all. Which is a complete bafflement to me, because my grandmother’s tomato soup recipe is bursting with flavor, has less salt even than the low-sodium stuff from the store, and still cans well. There’s no reason some company couldn’t make that recipe in a factory. But they don’t.
I was watching Great British Baking Show with my daughters, and at long last, there was a technical challenge that I would’ve won: pizza. The contestants didn’t know things as basic as “put corn meal on your pizza peel before you assemble your pizza on it,” and the result was a literal hot mess. Meanwhile I made a couple of gorgeous pizzas for our family, with a crust that was just the right blend of crispy and yeasty and chewy and soft, a thick garlicky herby tomato sauce, and a three-cheese blend–not to mention the toppings.
But then I remembered that I’d had about 36 hours to make my pizza, and the contestants got two hours. So, y’know, I’m not exactly kicking their butts.
That’s a big part of the reason why I can make things better than restaurants. Often when I cook, it’s a pastime. I’m doing it to pass the time, and the experience is the payoff (well, part of the payoff, the pizza is part, too). If I start a pizza a day and a half ahead of time, then I spend a couple of hours in the kitchen chopping ingredients and simmering tomato sauce and shaping crusts and listening to an audiobook or chatting with my kids, and then I watch the pizza bake through the door with nothing else to do except drink a beer, that’s the goddamned life.
That same behavior would get me fired so fast from any restaurant in the world. Restaurants have to prioritize speed and multitasking and efficiency. Sure, they can start their dough in advance; but they can’t keep an eye on the simmering sauce and make it in tiny batches the way I do. And they have to meet the needs of all customers, so their sauce probably won’t have as much garlic or herbs as mine does, because that’s not gonna be to everyone’s taste.
I recently got a sour dough starter and began making my own sourdough–its really good. In addition I make my own beer and wine, I cook, I make my own bacon and sausage, and I do woodworking–recent infatuation is scroll sawing fretwork.
I do all these things because my job is pushing paper and evaluating designs that probably won’t come to fruition in the next 5-10 years. When I come home after a day at work, I literally have nothing to show for it but a paycheck. My hobbies link a product to my labor. I can show my craft with pride.
When I came across the no-knead bread recipe, baking a loaf of that became a part of my weekly routine, the loaves came out as delicious as any $5 ‘artisan’ loaf in a store.
DIY yields better quality at a lower price. In 20 minutes I can set up 3 loaves of bread using a couple of dollars worth of materials. The baked result is far superior to anything from the store.
There is a sameness to the taste of commercial products from focaccia to cinnamon rolls. I assume all the dough comes from a vat the size of a swimming pool and is divided and combined with chemicals for flavor, color and identity. The difference between the ‘High Protein White Loaf’ and the ‘Rustic Country Wheat’ is the label.
With pizza specifically, there’s one thing that you probably can’t replicate at home: The oven. You get the best pizza from baking at high temperatures, higher than most home ovens will reach. Though, of course, it’s still quite possible that the other aspects (quality of ingredients, small batches, customization to your family’s tastes, more time) will be enough to overcome that deficiency and still get something that’s better overall than a restaurant’s pizza.
