With these mortal hands, I will bake you a loaf....

I’ve been baking bread, oh yes I have. Satisfying as it is to chomp on anything half decent that you’ve made yourself, I’ve got to say that producing a simple loaf of fresh, warm bread from the oven has given me a genuine sense of pride. It’s something so incredibly basic but such a staple - partly because it’s so basic. And delicious too, of course.

Okay, so I haven’t invented the wheel or discovered fire. All I’ve proved is that I too can do something that millions of people have been doing for thousands of years in hundreds of countries and cultures around the globe. But my point is that I’ve done something that not many of us – in this country at least – get the time to do any more.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe there to be plenty of great things about the times we live in. I don’t yearn for the days when we had to rub a couple of sticks together all day just to stay warm at night (although ‘making fire with two sticks’ is next on my ‘To do’ list.) But to lose touch with the food we eat, where it comes from and what goes in to it does seem to be something worth considering for a moment. Food is important isn’t it? (If only you could have seen what I ate as a student. I ate a Smash sandwich once. That wasn’t on homemade bread, I might add…)

Up until I started baking bread, 100% of the loaves that I bought came from supermarket shelves, well, maybe the odd one from a bakery. Occasionally a market. Okay, so probably more like 99.99% but that doesn’t have the same impact. Anyway; moving on…

Loaves sell at around a pound a go, readily sliced and convenient as you like. They last for days too. But when you taste your own fresh loaf there’s no comparison. Once you’ve started to hone your kneading techniques and produced the perfect dough – the kind of dough you don’t want to stop battering – you may decide to make a regular thing of baking your own.

But like many, I have a job to go to and soon enough Leanne and I will have a wee bairn to rear. That uncharismatic, but readily-sliced and oh so convenient, loaf of Kingsmill may just prove to be all too easy to grab from the shelves in the near future. No doubt it will remind us of how convenient modern life sometimes needs to be.

In the meantime, I encourage you, dear reader, to go forth and bake your own loaf when you get the chance – especially if you’ve never done it before. And lo and behold, here’s one of mine!

A fresh loaf of bread from the oven, courtesy of Jimblytheblindman

[Via http://jimblytheblindman.wordpress.com]