The smell of a freshly baked bread

I love it! And I love the freshly baked bread even more. It just melts in your mouth. I could eat through it all. On its own, or with a little bit of butter, olive oil and salt.

It is quite a rare to get a good bread straight from the oven here in New Zealand, unfortunately. For some reason, we just haven’t discovered really good bakeries here. Whenever I visit Europe, bakeries are on my to-do list! Fresh baguettes in France, little after surf treats in Portugal, or bigas at the Croatian coast.

I often thought I should learn and make bread myself. And try to recreate the taste of Europe in my home kitchen. However, I always thought it is a very difficult task, so I’ve been putting it off. Until now that we are locked in in our homes. Since I have nothing else to do, I finally have no excuse and plenty of time to practice and improve my bread baking skills!

I have tried three different recipes so far. The first one is a simple beer bread. It’s is really easy and relative fast to do. The bread is not exactly fluffy, and the crust is quite hard, but it is still yummy. I have used much less sugar than the recipe suggests, however I still found the bread quite sweet. It was perfect in the morning with some butter and jam, but I didn’t like it that much with avocado and cheese, for example.

The second recipe I tried is this one. This one takes a bit longer. As a novice, I was pretty confused with what it means to punch the dough though. I did indeed punch it. And I punched it well! But that just made my bread very compact. I called my friend’s mum for an advice, and she suggested I should always knead it and let it rise again. So next time I will just repeat that step again before putting the loaf in the oven. The bread was nevertheless delicious!

My favourite though was Jamie Oliver’s bread recipe. It is very easy to make. And the bread is mouth watering! I think I will work on this one and make it even better. Maybe add some herbs, or try to do a wholegrain version of it. The crust was perfect (I like it crunchy), but if I can get the inside a bit fluffier, that will be the winner. We’ll see, I have a few more weeks in the isolation to work on this one :).