I got off my butt yesterday and decided to go on a quest and try to make bread like my grandmother did many years ago.
I knew starting out that I wasn’t going to achieve my goal but you have to start somewhere right?
Gram’s bread was the best stuff you could ever wrap your olfactory senses around. She would easily make a dozen loaves at a time and it would fill the entire house up with that fresh bread smell as it baked. And when she was done? she would give it away to the neighbors, friends, family, etc. And there I would sit at the kitchen table watching people walk away with my bread! I never understood it. And I never paid attention to how she made it either. What a dumb ass.
The giving away part I never understood until I grew older. It was part of her informal barter system that she had developed over the years. If she wasn’t giving away (my) bread, it was meals, or canned pickles, or fresh applesauce, or canned tomato’s, or her chow-chow, or an myriad of other food stuffs.
The whole ‘feeding the neighborhood’ thing like I said earlier, or as we say today, paying it forward all came back to her every year in late summer and early fall.
People would bring her, snap beans, peas, sweet corn, chicken fryers, more apples, rhubarb, you name it. Most of the time is was given to her or at a very low cost. Chicken fryers, a lady would bring in dozens of eggs from her farm every couple of weeks, and at the end of the year, she would butcher part of her flock and sell them to Gram for pretty cheap. And I would stuff them in the freezer, along with the side of beef she would split with someone every year. There was always more food in that house than a 4’11” woman could ever eat. She kept doing this every year without fail. Until she was no longer able and I was off in the Navy.
I guess something rubbed off on me from her, cause I am baking bread!
Here is the recipe that I found online and to be honest I didn’t dig to deep in looking for one. I just wanted to try my hand.
http://breadbaking.about.com/od/yeastbreads/r/1loafbread.htm
The dough is a rising
Don’t look like much, and I’m skeptical that this will even resemble bread in the end.
The lonely loaf
WF was napping after she came home from work. When I took the bread out of the oven she came out of the bedroom and says why aren’t you eating that bread yet? So the smell part had the desired effect. That was Saturday afternoon. Today is Sunday and that loaf in the picture below? Gone! in my belly! Not what Gram made but I’ll get there.
I have another recipe I’m going to try later this week.
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