Bread is Zen

I picked up a new cook book at a garage sale last week. It's a nifty little 70's book simply titled Bread Baking. I'm enamored. Bread is a marvelous thing, pure magic really. There are about 50 recipes for different types of breads in this book. You know what? They all use the same ingredients! Just a handful of easy on hand items put in at different times in different combination produces completely different textures and tastes. Or so the book says.

My plan is to work my way through this book, starting today and ending sometime in the future. ;)
Though time is not linear and therefore we shouldn't have to be, I decided to start at the front of this book for simplicities sake. I'm making a white bread(which I would normally not eat) using unbleached flour. It has an easy mixing and rising time. I'm thinking it should be moist and tender and slightly dense as the ingredients include milk as well as water. I'm hoping for some good french toast or Nutella sandwiches out of it.

I will say that this is not my first foray into bread. I've been making no knead bread, hamburger and hotdog buns, pizza dough and homemade tortillas fairly regular for a few years now. I also worked a small stint at a local bread shop.

There is something about bread that is so tactile and delicious. Both in it's making and consumption. There are so many life lessons to be learned and mastered through the art of bread-making, things that I could really use, like patients and forethought and patients.