Baking with Cody

My dad adored good bread, and by good bread I mean flavorful bread with a chewy crust. Dad always said that he liked bread with "character", which meant that when you bit into a piece of bread, your teeth better be up to the job. "Toothsome" would be a good descriptor of the type of bread Dad taught us to like. My brother and I did grow up to appreciate hearty crusty bread and to disdain squishy, processed bread, and with plenty of good bakeries in the Cleveland area, we had easy access to many types of bread with character. And on rare occasions when Dad traveled to San Francisco, he would bring back a loaf or two of truly sour sourdough bread; that bread did not last long in our house.

Now that James' garden is providing us with many delicious tomatoes, we are eating a lot of 'mater sandwiches. A LOT. With or without bacon. And a key ingredient of a good tomato sandwich is good bread, but with the heat of summer (and a kitchen that does not benefit from a/c), I am taking a break from baking artisan bread. Enter the trusty bread machine. The bread I make with the bread machine does not have nearly the character of artisan bread, but it also doesn't raise the temperature in the house.

I decided to bake a loaf of bread in the machine last Saturday and pulled out my many bread recipe books, which all but one came from Dad. They are all good, reliable sources but what I treasure most is the notes that Dad wrote in those books. Here is the recipe I chose to make:


You can see that Dad tinkered with the recipe and decided that more sugar was needed, so of course I followed his advice. The resulting bread was delicious, just the right amount of heft and crust to hold up to the tomatoes, mayonnaise, salt and pepper. The sandwich was delicious.

One of our favorite breads is Dede's Buttermilk Bread from The Bread Machine Magic Book of Helpful Hints. Here is what Dad noted on the recipe:


He changed the amounts of two ingredients as well as the crust setting, and he was absolutely right on all three. The stars at the top left of the page indicate our rating of this recipe - 4.5 stars out of a possible 5.

Dad was definitely a scientist, experimenting with amounts and baking times, and making careful notes. I experiment with recipes, too, but am not always so careful with my notes...and often find myself making the recipe again and asking myself "What did I change the last time?"

I miss Dad every single day so I treasure those books that he used; in those notes in his precise printing, I get to spend a little time with him, even when doing something as mundane as baking.