My First Loaf of Bread

I've always loved bread, toast, and pastries but baking bread has always seemed difficult and out of reach. That is, until I stumbled upon a website called The Fresh Loaf. This website first attracted me with its mouth-watering pictures of different types of bread and the simple beginner lessons. I read the first few lessons and strove to bake the amazing breads I saw on the site's homepage. This is the first step of that path.

Following the instructions of the first loaf lesson, I set up my ingredients and cleaned an area on my dining room table.

I stirred the dough until it all came together and poured it out onto a floured portion of the table. I started kneading using mostly the palm of my hand and I was able to use my height advantage versus the table to really put some leverage on the dough. I was very cautious with adding more flour to the dough even though it was very sticky. I now know that I should have added more flour while kneading whenever it got too sticky to handle.

After letting it rise for about an hour, I kneaded the dough again and shaped it on an overturned baking sheet.

While baking my work was rewarded with the warm smell of bread while I studied and worked on school projects. The result was not some monstrous blob or flat disk, but certainly bread! and my fears of the complex procedure began to crack. They are still holding strong but I will be chipping away at them later this week. The crust of the bread was crispy but not too hard and the inside was soft, and had a light texture.