Our Bread Journey.

I was first bitten by the bread bug when a friend shared the NYTimes publication of Jim Lahey’s no knead bread recipe. Until then, the idea of producing a fantastically crusty, chewy loaf of bread with a beautiful open crumb was completely foreign to me. By the time Royce and I started dating, we both had a pretty respectable collection of bread books. Once we moved in together we started learning and experimenting even more, and then Royce did a stint as an instructor at George Brown College, and had to develop more in-depth knowledge so that he could teach the Baking and Pastry Arts program, which has a heavy focus on bread in the first semester.

As we got more comfortable with different techniques, we began to make our own bread more and more often. Now, with the exception of Royce’s favourite hamburger buns, most of the bread we eat is homemade. There is something pretty amazing about the range of incredible breads that you can produce with just a few, simple ingredients. Apart from the sense of pride that comes from making your own bread, there is also the motivation to reduce waste. Something that really frustrates Royce is thinking about all of the bread left in the grocery store bakeries at the end of the day, and while making our own bread doesn’t solve the problem of food waste, at least we’re not contributing to it. Fun fact: we recently learned that some bakeries in France grinds up their day old bread using something called the Crumbler and recycle it as an ingredient to make new bread. Unfortunately, I don’t know that this approach has picked up any mainstream adoption in Canada yet!

Our interest and love for bread has continued to grow. Here, our aim is to share the basic knowledge that we have gathered over the years, to provide some useful information for anyone interested in making their own bread. We have also categorized our recipes according to bread type, with a separate section on sourdough. Hopefully this will be useful to some of you! If it is or isn’t, or if there are any topics or recipes that you’d like to see that are missing, please let us know!