How I caught the bread baking bug

About a month ago I got bitten by the bread baking bug. I was motivated to try baking bread at home to avoid cross-contamination with peanuts, tree nuts, corn, soy and dairy, wholesome ingredients used by most commercial and artisan bakeries to which my 3.5 year old daughter is allergic to. By coincidence around that time my husband discovered and emailed me a version of the recipe for no-knead bread that has been making the rounds of the amateur gourmet circles of the blogosphere since it appeared in the New York Times a little over two years ago. It has been evolved since the initial version by the many cooks who tried it. The version of the recipe that landed in my Inbox came from the blog of Adam D. Roberts, a.k.a. The Amateur Gourmet and author of a book by the same name. For my first attempt I followed the recipe by the book (or should I say, by the blog... ha ha ha... ahem). I bragged about my success on Facebook, posting photos like the ones of no-knead bread 1.0, below (looks tasty, doesn't it?) and friends started asking me for the recipe, wanting to try it.

I decided that it may be a good idea to blog about my bread baking experiments. That way I can showcase my Iron Chef (not) skills, share my recipes with my friends and keep track of my recipes, all at the same time.
I decided to name the blog (quite appropriately) "Daily Bread" because for some reason the relevant line ("and give us this day our daily bread") from the Lord's Prayer in Polish, French and English kept popping into my head. I had this revelation that it had to be about this, the bread that we used to bake daily to feed our families (not according to Wikipedia though, they say it is supposed to be about something symbolic, but I like the simple explanation better). Now mind you, I am no longer a Christian (I think of myself as a Spiritual Freethinker), but I did learn the Lord's Prayer in each of those languages in my life. So "Daily Bread" it is.

After my encouraging early results with the no-knead bread, I became more adventurous and started to tweak the recipe by substituting ingredients and changing proportions. I added whole grain rye flour and honey for a more "wholesome" loaf (versions 2.0 and 2.1) and right now version 3.0, a.k.a. "Whoops", is rising in our computer room (it seems that it has the right temperature to make yeast and bread growing bacteria happy). Whoops is called that because I meant to repeat 2.1, since it was so wildly successful with my tasters (my husband, my daughter and, well, yours truly), but I accidentally added spelt flour in addition to the rye. Whoops! We'll see what turns out tomorrow.

At the same time that I was playing with no-knead bread, I made the decision to try to grow my own starter, old school like. I found a fantastic Polish language blog by an amateur baker called Moja Piekarnia (My Bakery). The author describes step by step what to do to successfully grow one's own starter. I tried it and I was successful. The starter looked and smelled funny (think baby poop), but the bread (dark rye) turned out OK. My first attempt was brick-like, but tasted fine, like a "razowy" bread from Poland. I figured out that I used the wrong kind of rye flour (too coarse) and made pumpernickel-like bread. I am just learning about the huge differences in flours here, in the United States, there, in Poland, and everywhere. It seems like every country has different flours and the system of grading them varies from place to place. Still, the bread was moist and tasty and the second attempt with the starter that had grown stronger was better yet. Right now "Freddy The Starter" is sitting in a small jar in my refrigerator, waiting for me to get the right flour so we may try to make sour dough bread again.