Staff Meals

I've been on a bread making kick lately.  A kind of kick I never would have gone on in B'ton.  There was no reason to when I could get olive ciabatta from the bocadillo shop downstairs, or brioche and pastries from Flour (oh sweet, Flour) two blocks over, or vendors like When Pigs Fly at the SoWA markets on Sundays.  Or hop over to Chinatown (cheap buns and rolls at the old Canto shops, the fancier Taiwanese stuff at 101).  Good bread existed everywhere.  Not Paris good or Taipei good.  But good enough.  Here in B'more, I've been on a bread kick out of laziness and desperation.  I live in a bread desert.  So last week, not wanting to go to the grocery store for disappointing subpar bread, I made it myself.  I tossed together a white bread-cheddar-salami-rustic-winging-it-without-a-recipe loaf.  It was good enough.

Today, I upped the ante with an actual recipe and made a challah boule.  The fun of saying both those words, together and separately, was worth the (very little) effort.  Turns out, yeast does most of the work in these situations.  I just had to measure and clean up.  The recipe said to wait for the bread to cool.  But I was impatient to have it with my dinner-of-breakfast-food-egg-scramble that I gladly burnt my hand for the fresh bread.  And I would gladly do it again for another taste at the fluffy, sweet, just-out-of-the-over taste.