It's nearly lunchtime and the aroma of baking bread is wafting through the house. Twice I've stepped outside for a few minutes just to catch that wonderful smell as I came back in. The oven timer is due to buzz in about four minutes. The hardest part is waiting for the loaves to cool enough for slicing.
I bought a bread machine as a Christmas present for Maggie and me. Okay, mostly for me. I gave up baking bread years ago because I really hated kneading the dough by hand. It's messy and boring. The bread machine makes all of that go away. We baked the first loaf right in the machine like the manual says. Italian bread that looks like it was baked in a square flower pot doesn't taste much like Italian bread from the bakery. Since then I've used the machine only for mixing and kneading and the first rising. From that point I continue the process by hand.
There are tons of recipes out there on the web so I won't go into that. Except for one little hint that I found on only one obscure site. If you like to bake your bread on a hearth stone like I do you know that the loaves tend to collapse or deflate no matter how carefully you transfer them to the stone in the oven. To avoid this I pulverize one half of a 500 mg. vitamin C pill and add it to the mix. Try it yourself. It works.
Oh, it surely must be cool enough to slice by now.
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