My husband, the bread baker’s apprentice

Posted by Breeze on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Category: Breeze

Mr. Breeze just had his birthday, and in our recent tradition, one of his gifts was a cook book. He was interested in baking sour dough bread in the month leading up to his birthday, and while we gave it the multiple-college-degree try, we just couldn’t do it. I researched and selected The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

So far, I’ve been very pleased. Mr. B. is so hard to shop for that I frequently despair, but he has given every indication that this cook book was a hit, reading it pretty much cover-to-cover and baking from it repeatedly.

Here’s one of my favorite breads so far–a brioche. He made it again tonight, but he decided to go with regular old loaf pans instead of the fancy snowman in the traditional brioche pan.

I call it a cook book, but it’s far more than a collection of recipes. It goes into a great deal of detail on the science behind bread baking. My guy’s a sucker for that sort of thing, and I’m a sucker for the smell that is winding its way up to my room from the kitchen where his current loaf is baking. As much as I love the bread itself, it’s also very nice to learn little tidbits such as the fact that cutting into hot bread isn’t a good thing because it is still cooking inside and even more fun that the crust is actually caramelized sugars from the wheat. Who knew?

We’re a month out from his birthday, and every weekend, he bakes some new and wonderful treat for our family. I just heard the oven timer go off, but since I’ve been taught that with bread patience is always a virtue, I’m not going to run downstairs right now and start begging.