I bake bread and bread products because with a few exceptions, it’s always better than store bought. Plus, I just love the process. I made English muffins today. They’re fun because the cook on the stove top. I use a stand mixer to get it going, but I really enjoy the hand kneading. The burger bun recipe I used that had both my husband and son asking me if we could always have homemade, instead of store bought:
As for gardening, in addition to being therapeutic to get outside and dig in the dirt, I love that I can spend $1.69 on green bean seeds and later in the summer have pounds and pounds of fresh green beans with almost no effort. I also grow San Marzano tomatoes and can fresh tomato sauce. I enjoy the process and the family loves it. Last year, 4 plants (like $3.99 each) yielded eight gallons of tomatoes, which yielded 8 quarts of tomato sauce.
Knitting, sewing and other crafting is usually because I enjoy it and can make something exactly how I want it.
The bread I’m baking at home isn’t the same as the stuff being made on a large industrial scale. There are not large factories, to my knowledge, making whole wheat sourdough undergoing a long fermentation and putting it in the grocery store only hours after it was baked. There may be a local bakery making something comparable but that isn’t a large industrial scale even though they will benefit from a larger economy of scale than I am (and they’ll have more expertise than I do).
Now sure, I’m not being forced to bake at home or be forced to live an existence without bread or other baked products. There are plenty of tasty baked products available commercially, and I buy plenty of them, but I can’t buy lemon squares exactly the way I prefer them. Now hypothetically speaking if I could buy things from the store precisely the way I like for a comparable cost to make them at home, I’d probably bake a whole lot less. I’d still probably bake some though, there is a satisfaction in successfully pulling off something tasty particularly if there are other people to appreciate your effort.
I like baking bread because it can be relatively little effort (if you use a no-knead recipe, which I do and then let cold ferment in the fridge for several days), it’s cheap, it makes the house smell good, and, honestly, a freshly baked loaf tastes better than anything I can get at the grocery store, although the problem is it has the shelf life of like a day, then you have to start toasting it.
Japanese milk bread is also fantastic when I want something more like a spongy white bread, and something that will have a longer shelf life. But that’s much more involved of a recipe and nowhere near as easy as just getting a 70-75% hydration dough going, walking away for a couple hours, sticking it in the fridge for a few days, then baking it some time later in the week.
True; but the tomatoes will still almost always be bred primarily for greatest production, and may well also be bred for consistent size and shape so as to work most easily with the processing equipment. Flavor’s still likely to mostly go by the wayside.
While tomatoes in the grocery will very likely be tasteless, those who can’t or don’t want to grow their own can probably find good ones in season at a farmers’ market, if they have access to a producers’ market (in some states, what’s for sale at something calling itself a “farmers’ market” may be the ones the grocery didn’t want or couldn’t sell.)
I can get bread for sandwiches or hot dogs that is tolerable but for the most part I don’t have access to decent bread. Unless I make a special trip to an actual bakery or Fresh Market (I love their sea salt and rosemary bread), I can’t get bread I like. But I’m too lazy to make my own bread so I just do without most of the time.
You know how hard it is to get good barbecue ribs? You wouldn’t think it’d be that hard in Arkansas but it can be terribly difficult. I’ve been to places that cook their ribs too quickly, don’t remove the silver skin before smoking, and one place I’m convinced boiled the ribs and placed them on a grill with a little smoke before serving. Blech! I will never match the rib preparing prowess of a place like Cozy Corner in Memphis, Tennessee, but I can smoke ribs that are better than what I can get at many places locally.
Yep, boiling ribs and then finishing them on a grill is a known technique. Blech, indeed.
Yes!! Cozy Corner. You know what’s odd about them? They use that big aquarium smoker (which I’ve never seen outside Chicago) and they load it up with only coals – no smoking wood. The ribs are cooked directly over the coals, so the juices and fat drip onto them and give the meat this lovely smoky-grilled “fat-in-the-fire” flavor that I love. Those were my favorite ribs in Memphis. I believe Payne’s is also charcoal-only – when I was there, I asked them what kind of wood they used, and they said only coals.
Not sure what salinqmind and pulykamell have been using for no-knead, but I’ve been baking this to pretty good results (I increase salt to 2.5% though) :
I don’t bake… but my wife does. She’s a baking hobbyist- we’ve got all sorts of baking and cake-decorating stuff, as well as a bunch of different types of flour- regular AP, bread, whole wheat, white whole wheat, kamut, spelt, Tipo 00 (for pizza), KA European, White lily AP (for biscuits- less protein), cake flour, pastry flour, rye (I think), and semolina.
She just enjoys it, plus for a lot of things, it’s easier to just make them. Pizza crust is the best example of something that you just can’t really buy, but isn’t that hard to make yourself. Same with a lot of pastries/desserts.
Yeah, you can’t go wrong with that. I just wing it these days (I know the ratios), but that recipe is basically the same one I use, though I will often push the hydration to 75%. 70% is easier to handle, though. At 75%, it starts to get a little unruly. I’ve done as high as 85%, I think. I also use 2% salt instead of 1.5% as in that recipe. And I find a 4-6 hours at room temperature is enough, as long as it’s in the fridge for at least 3 days. But the original recipe that was printed in the New York times that started the no-knead craze was something like 12-18 hours, IIRC.
