HANDMADE BREAD: Beyond Traditional Loaves
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother who cooked nearly everything from scratch. In addition to cooking meals and packing lunches for our large family, she also began baking bread when I was young. She most generally made four loaves at a time, three times a week, to meet the toast, garlic bread, and sandwich needs of the 10 of us.
One of my favorite memories of those years was Mum timing the bread so it was coming out of the oven just as we were getting home from school — a particularly wonderful, welcoming, warming smell on those cold, wet Northwest winter days.
My mother mixed up her bread dough in a contraption I remember as simply “the bread-maker.” It was a heavy dough hook with a wooden handle, connected to a lid that clamped onto the rim of a large, deep pot. The pot sat in a simple base with suction cups that held it securely in place on the counter.
She put the ingredients in the pot, clamped on the lid, and cranked the handle. The dough hook sat just above the bottom of the pot, so it mixed the ingredients quite thoroughly and efficiently without scraping the sides or bottom of the pot.
