The smell of fresh-baked bread

I always used to think that making your own bread was difficult and that I certainly would be no good at baking it.  In fact, I approached all products that used yeast with fear and trepidation.  Why, I'm not sure, but that is the case.  I love to cook and bake, but I just baked all sorts of quick breads with baking soda and powder  - no yeast required.  But, when my husband bought me a Kitchen Aid mixer 2 Christmas' ago, I saw the recipes for homemade bread and decided to give it a shot.  It turned out that making bread wasn't as complicated as I had thought, but I was still pretty particular about taking the temperature of my water before putting in the sweetener and yeast, and was picky about getting everything else in the recipe just right. 

Then, this summer, my mother-in-law was so kind as to give us her breadmaker that she wasn't using and we brought it home with us to California.  We all loved using it because it was as easy as putting all the ingredients in the bucket in the prescribed order, putting the bucket into the machine, and pushing a button; the machine did the rest.  One evening, I decided to try the egg bread for the first time and this turned out to be the demise of my breadmaker.  The dough overflowed the baking bucket, went down into the rest of the maker with the heating element, and started to burn up.  After, cleaning out the breadmaker and reattaching all electrical elements, it still wouldn't even turn back on.  I had to dump the pizza dough I was making out of the breadmaker bucket and into my Kitchen Aid and just mix everything ad hoc.  The dough turned out fabulously and I found out that doughs and yeast aren't really as scary as I had thought.

So, this led me to try making the sourdough starter from the recipe in my Breadman book.  It was a success and the loaf shown above was my first ever homemade loaf of sourdough bread.   Ah, the wonderful smell of fresh-baked bread!  Well, I'm off to start another loaf.