How to Bake Almost Anything

If I could overcome my first run-in with yeast – and the lopsided result – anyone can

As many of us turn our hands to baking, a cooking expert shares tips on making bread and other delicious goodies.

My introduction to baking started with the home-kitchen classic that cracks open the oven door for so many – chocolate chip cookies. It was the 1970s, and most of the mothers in my largely Catholic neighbourhood were busy raising big families. For the girls in my house, that meant our mother made sure we knew our way around the kitchen. At the flour-dusted table, she taught eight-year-old me how to make the cookies perfectly chewy with a crispy exterior. The big secret was to always chill your dough.

We crafted them by the dozen, measuring ingredients from yellow

Tupperware containers and mixing everything in my mother’s aqua butterprint Pyrex bowl, part of a set she’d received as a wedding gift in 1963. Friends who grew up in ‘freshfruit-is- dessert’ households could not get enough when they visited. And if they happened to come over when the cookie jar was empty, they were not shy about sharing their disappointment.

So from a young age, I was crystal clear on the power of baked-to-perfection cookies to make people happy. Baking cookies – then brownies, cakes and pies – became my hobby and a tasty form of social currency. First, I used my skills with butter and sugar to impress a series of teenage boyfriends. In time, the fresh goodies were left on doorsteps to welcome new neighbours and set out in the tea room for colleagues. Baking was my superpower.

A few years ago, I became content director for Taste of Home, the Reader’s Digest website and sister magazine in the US that celebrates the treasured recipes of home cooks. I’d never been more excited for a new job, but privately I worried that my baking skills wouldn’t measure up. Why? I had a secret as dark as an oven with a burned-out light bulb: while I had baked sweets my whole life, I’d never made a yeast bread from scratch.

Mum couldn’t help me with this one. For her, frozen dough from the supermarket was her go-to when she needed ‘from scratch’ bread. I understand why: bread dough prov ides so many opportunities to fail. Cookies are forgiving. You can be a little of f in your measurements, and, trust me, those cookies still disappear from the office tea room. Not the case with yeast breads. Most recipes recommend weighing ingredients careful ly, down to the gram.

Then there’s the yeast. Yeast is

BECAUSE YEAST IS ALIVE, I COULD KILL IT - AND RATHER EASILY

fussy, the Goldilocks of ingredients. Mix it in water too cool and it won’t activate; too hot, and it dies. Yes, yeast is a living, one- celled member of the fungus family. Because it is alive, I could, of course, kill it – and unfortunately rather easily.

And don’t forget that other potential failure point: the kneading. Too little kneading and the bread will be flat. But don’t overdo it! Knead it too much, and the loaf will be tough and chewy.

Still, this was no time for excuses. I was a baker, now one with Taste of

Home attached to my name. I may have been intimidated by bread, but it was time. I wanted in.

Getting started, I found Instagram to be a friend. A basic no-knead bread was the one I was seeing online overlaid with dreamy filters. People described it as easy, and to be honest, the thought of removing even one intimidating variable – kneading – was enough to get me to buy 2.5 kilograms of bread flour and dive in.

I gathered everything I needed – ‘ be prepared’ is the first rule of any baking, including my mother’s trusty Pyrex. It had seen me through my first days as a baker, so I was counting on it to work its magic. I had an easy

Taste of Home recipe all set on my iPad. I mixed the flour, salt and yeast and made sure the water temperature was just right – 37 to 46°C – before pouring it in. And then it happened – or didn’t happen.

I followed the instructions to the letter, but my dough didn’t rise. Somehow, impossibly, it looked smaller. Sludgy, gooey, wet with a few bubbles. Sad.

The Pyrex bowl didn’t save me, so I had to figure out how to do it myself. Frantically googling ‘bread dough didn’t rise’ yielded a likely answer – the room was too cold. But I found some solutions, too. I put the disappointing dough in the oven with the light on, a trick that provides just a bit of gentle heat, to let it try again.

Three hours later, after I’d resisted the urge to keep checking on it like a nervous mum with a newborn, a puffy dough filled the bowl. I hadn’t killed it; it was just ... sleeping. A quick fold, a second rise, and then my bread went into my Dutch oven and off to bake.

Thirty minutes later, I took it out. Sure, it was slightly misshapen, but in my eyes, it was golden-brown, crusty perfection, right down to the yeastysweet hit of steam coming from its top.

Natural ly, the first thing I did was grab my phone and hop on Instagram, positioning my beautiful bread just so in a shining stream of daylight on a wooden cutting board. No one needed to know it was my first yeast bread ever – or how close it came to getting scraped into the bin.

The online reactions started almost immediately – heart emojis and comments such as “This looks DELISH!” from my friends. They couldn’t taste it, but virtual sharing yields its own rewards.

Final ly, I cut into that lovely brown crust and doled out slices to my husband and kids. Those slices led to seconds, then thirds, each piece slathered with softened butter and a little sprinkle of coarse salt.

SURE, IT WAS SLIGHTLY MISSHAPEN, BUT IN MY EYES, IT WAS PERFECTION