So there was point in my culinary career where I viewed all appliances outside of a KitchenAid completely unnecessary.  As I write this now, I’m involuntarily making a list of reasons why this was crazy. Maybe it stemmed from time at a Williams-Sonoma where people came in asking for mango cutters and corn cobbers. There was a time this summer when I viewed the bread machine as a mechanism for laziness. Why would you ever need a machine when, really, the only reason bread takes so long is because it has to rise? I mean the labor was minimal. Right? Hmm. Turns out, making your own bread while you’re employed full time and training for a marathon isn’t actually a functional scenario. Throw in the canning and suddenly its July, you still smell like vinegar from a weekend of making salsa and its 11:30 at night and your bread won’t be done for a half hour. Guess who’s not doing speedwork in the morning? Yeah. That’s where ended. I surrendered to store bought bread at that point.

 I find it odd that I never once considered that maybe there was device that could assist me in this endeavor. Maybe I wrote it off so thoroughly in the beginning that I had to stray far enough from the whole thing in order to be able to see it. Whatever the case, it took about 6 months for me to come around, and once I realized that after buying the bread machine I wouldn’t even so much as have to mix the ingredients together it became impossible for me to stray from the idea.  I could literally put the ingredients in the bread machine, set the timer, and wake up to a fresh, hot, loaf of bread.

 I can’t remember the exact impetus for turning to homemade bread, but it occurred around the time I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and In Defense of Food.  There’s a lot in both of those books about the demise of healthy grain products and rise of nutritionally negative Wonder Bread and I guess some of it struck a cord with me: If I could make my own bread, I could make it super healthy. Plus I love bread and have become fiercely (stubbornly?) dedicated to removing myself as thoroughly as possible from what I imagine is called The Food Grid.  Which, I guess, is to say that I had found a way to remove myself from the industrial vegetables, and then from industrial meat, and it irked me I couldn’t quite do the same with bread. Basically, I want to know what’s in my bread. I want to know where it came from or, at the very least, I want to know that whole grains are whole, and I want to be able to add healthy things like oats and flaxseed.

So, I’m about to break free. It’s liberating.  I just need to work out the kinks (why do the loaves keep collapsing?) before I pour my dear, but pricey local whole wheat flour into the machine.

 Additionally, it makes pizza dough. So come Wednesday, I’m going to arrive home from work with perfect pizza dough ready to be shaped, topped and tossed in the oven. Yum.