No Matter How You Slice It, This Bread is Pretty Darn Good

"If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens." ~Robert Browning

I have long harboured an aversion to yeast. This might stem from the psychological trauma of a high school biology experiment gone a-rye (sorry, I couldn't resist), but more likely, my baking failures in the past probably have a good deal to do with it as well. The rising/punching down thing sort of scares me. (As this recipe proved, it was a needless worry.) Unfortunately, the kinds of bread that always catch my eye and make me think, "Ooooh, wouldn't that be fun to bake?" are the ones that have yeast in them. My former roommate, Sara, is a bread baker extraordinaire - seriously, you should see what she can do with flour and eggs - and whenever I think of her, I think of bread. On Sunday, I had the delight of seeing her again for the first time in about a year, and it got me back on this bread train of thought. Fine, I thought. If I'm going to make yeast bread, I'm going to make it pretty so that at least if the yeast and rising and all that doesn't work out, it'll be nice to look at.

Ah, the Internet. Such a useful tool. I hit the usual recipe websites and finally came out with one that I thought I could manage. I got out all my ingredients and set to work, but it was only about ten seconds before I hit my first (incredibly minor) snag. "Active dry yeast? What's that?" The jar I was holding was a jar of instant yeast (my family owns a breadmaker). After consulting various search engines, I learned that you could use instant yeast in pretty much the same way as active dry yeast. Onward, then. Everything else went off without a hitch. The final product is here:

The family seemed to approve, if the speed at which the loaf was devoured is any indication.

Next on the breadmaking agenda is to use the yeast that the recipe actually calls for. I'm going to get this proofing thing down pat.