Spice up Your Baking Bread Routine

The funny thing about baking bread with the best bread maker is that it can easily become mediocre. Okay, let me just get that put of the way. Now, I’m probably going to fend some people. I’m probably going to discourage some people, but that’s just the truth. If we don’t deal with the truth and we’re not honest about the truth, it’s going to be very hard for us to make progress baking bread, seriously.

Eventually, you will find out this truth for yourself, and you probably would not be prepared, and you just end up giving up on baking bread because at the back of your mind, you probably would want to be doing many other things. You might be thinking that you’d rather be at many other places, except for your kitchen.

The reason for this is you did not have the right mindset coming in. You thought that it was going to be a lot of fun. You thought that it was going to be very exciting, and guess what? The first loaf might be awesome, the second loaf, less so, and the excitement level just drops like a rock after that. Again, you’re not alone.  A few people are hardly immune to this process, but if you are a professional baker or you just love a freshly baked crusty loaf of home-made bread every morning but hate the process, I’ve got some great news for you.

You can spice up your baking routine. That’s right, it doesn’t have to be a routing in the first place. It can be a daily celebration of your personal freedom. I know that sounds a little bit philosophical. It may seem a tad exaggerated. But I’m not making this up nor am I blowing things up out of proportion. It is a celebration of freedom when you bake bread machine recipes.

Why? You could have easily given into your need for convenience and just walked yourself to the corner store and bought yourself some store bought bread. This is how 99.9% of the other people on your block do things. Why rock the boat right? If you’re the person who actually took the initiative to buy the ingredients for your bread and took the time to roll up your sleeves and bake yourself some amazing bread, you stand out from the crowd. You’re no longer just another member of the herd.

This is freedom. Freedom, of course, is not something that you gain automatically. It’s something that you exercise. It’s something that you stand up for and when you take the initiative to get ingredients, follow a recipe, and then experiment with bread taste until you get it right, and then you do this over and over again.

You’re doing something different. You’re doing something that people wish they could do. They make all sorts of excuse. They love the taste and texture of fresh baked bread, but they make all sorts of excuses. You’re that one person that just bucked the trend. You bucked what’s convenient and you came up with amazing bread.

This is how you do it. You have to create a ritual and make the bread the star of the show. When you make it a center piece of your meal, baking bread will never become routine. It won’t. Why? Because you look forward to completing the meal with the bread. It is the crowning achievement of the culinary artistry that you just performed.

Maybe you and your significant other helped each other prepare of the meal, maybe had friends and family over, but once the bread makes it to the table, everybody knows that that is the star of the show. When you make a big deal out of bread and you allow some sort of ritual in both presenting it, as well as baking it, it makes it all that much harder for you to lose your heart when it comes to baking bread.

You start looking at each and every loaf as its own distinct creation. It’s as if that loaf is a distinct timestamp of where you are in your life at that particular point in time. I don’t want to sound like I’m reading too much into this, but you know what? Everything that you do in your life is an expression of your emotional and mental state. The way you dress the way you greet people, their facial expressions, they all come from an inner source.

Why not bread? Follow a ritual. Let your love for baking shine through and you would be rewarded many times over. A little bit of expression or the willingness to entertain it can do wonders both to the quality, the texture, and the overall presentation of your bread. Spice things up. Make your bread the key part of your meal. Make it the star of the show.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our kitchen product reviews!