A Baking Story

About two years ago, I was inspired by the anime Yakitate Japan! to start baking. Baking to me wasn't about bread, pastries and so on, it wasn't about the end product. Instead, it was more about the process, the mixing, kneading and baking. Yes, I prefer to be called as an artisan compared to a baker. Why? Because baking is an art to me, everything is done so artistically, the proportion of ingredients is calculated by maths, the kneading of dough requires technique and the time needed for rising and baking is calculated in minutes. For a good bread, everything must be perfect!

I started out with baking traditional white bread, a bread which only uses four basic ingredients. These ingredients are flour, water, yeast and salt. No electronics were used except for my oven. The best part of baking bread would probably be during the rising where you can actually see your dough expand 2-3 times its original size. It's like seeing your baby hamster growing up into a full-blown treadmill running hamster.

The first few attempts were failures due to the poor rising time, the breads were as hard as stones that they were not even edible by pigeons! For my 4^th attempt, I made it! A bread which was edible even by human. I wasn’t satisfied though; I wanted a bread with a fluffier texture, more holes inside and a crunchier crust. The mission implausible started.

            I needed to make a bread with higher water content around 80% of the flour weight. It was almost impossible as the dough was so wet (it was almost liquid) that I couldn’t even knead it with my hands, it kept flowing out of my fingers every time I hold it like some quicksand. The experiment went on for four times before I actually succeeded, miraculously. For the first time, my family (my guinea pigs =P) actually agreed that the bread was good!

            However, that was my only success. I had to go back to my university since my holidays are over. Half a year later when I thought I could remake something as wonderful as that bread, I was devastated. All hell broke loose when I made my worst bread ever! After a post-mortem, I realized my yeast was dead. That’s the reason to why my bread didn’t rise an inch (this time it's even harder than stone, its basically Ironman armor material!). Yeast is like the soul of a bread, without it, the bread is lifeless, how could I forget to read the expiry date before using it!!! Since then, I stopped baking, the fear of unleashing the worst bread ever still lurks within my mind. I never want to feed my family with something that terrible again. =( 

           Tonight, a new light shined onto me. I realized I could change my horrible fate if I could get myself to join the “Baking Workshop”. With supervision of experts, I could relive my life as an artisan! Maybe I could even get a reaction from my family like this! =P