[Sca-cooks]Baking Workshops, was Brighid's breads

[smcclune at earthlink.net]

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Carroll-Mann <rcmann4 at earthlink.net>

Maybe we could have a baking workshop some time?  There might be some other folks who'd be interested, too.  Bread-making is easy, once you learn the look and the feel of dough that's ready for the next step.  I turned out quite a few doorstops when I started baking, because I was slavishly following the flour quantities in the recipes. 
<<<

This is a very good point ... I attended a baking workshop in a neighboring group this past summer, and even I, in whom the bread-baking gene is notably absent, managed to produce an edible loaf of something really like bread (the piecrust still needs work, though <sigh>.  All of my previous baking attempts were made by following recipes, and there's a lot about bread baking that can't be learned from a book.  You have to see/feel/smell it to really understand.

Of course, that may be why the bread-baking gene *is* absent in my branch of the family.  My grandmother did occasional baking (nutbread and strudel, yummmm!), but when my mom was growing up and wanted to learn to cook, Grandma told her she would have plenty of time to practice her cooking skills once she was grown-up and married, and so she never taught mom much in the way of cookery.  As a result, Mom never learned how bread is supposed to look/feel/smell, and was therefore unable to pass the knowledge along to me.

Though that doesn't explain why my other grandmother, who grew up on a Nebraska farm and was presumably exposed to the baking process at an early age, still couldn't bake breads or pastries to save her life ... though she kept on trying, bless her heart! :)

Of course, in my case, being at a higher altitude is a complicating factor, too.  For some reason, the cookbooks I was using never seemed to take that into account... 

So I would highly recommend having a bread-making workshop -- think of it as gene-splicing for those of us without the bread gene!

Arwen
Caerthe, Outlands
(Denver, CO)