In which I get all gooshy about bread

Here's what I love: baking bread.

Here's why: it just feels so damn good!

But really, I have been trying to capture just what is so great about baking bread since I baked the best loaf of my life last week. It's very hard for me to put into words. Certainly one of the best parts about it is what a surprise the results always are. And not so much even a surprise that it "turns out," but a surprise that home baking with natural leaven has yielded such consistently amazing results for me.

My best loaf to date

In the year and a half since I got Tartine Bread for Christmas and started baking with a wild yeast starter, I've come to see baking an excellent loaf as a mysterious combination of work and not-work. On the one hand, I know it is my hands that do the mixing, that feed my starter every day, that constantly take notes to see if I can determine what works and what doesn't, that shape and slash and load the loaves. But...the end result of this labor always feels like so much more than the sum of it's parts. In the end, I mostly wait around and do other things while large communities of microflora eat, belch, and reproduce in my rising bowl.

And maybe that's why I love it so much...it makes me feel both proud and humble. I can sort of say, "I made that," but really I'm just one part of a centuries-old, multispecies project that continues to fill the hearts and bellies of Homo sapiens.

And what a tasty project it is.

Don't forget the butter.