100 Loaves of Bread: The Final Post
I just baked the last loaf of my 100 Loaves of Bread project. In addition to learning how to bake great bread, I learned a few things about myself and doing life projects. If you’re interested in a view of the project by the numbers, that can be found on my Analytics page.
Slow Learning
You can’t bake bread fast, and you can’t learn about baking bread in parallel. Bread baking is a slow linear process and lessons aren’t learned from each loaf until you taste the finished product. I enjoy this type of patient learning, I’ve done it before with photography and woodworking. I think the experience of making progress through a long series of small steps helps me be more patient in other areas of life.
The Gift of Bread
When I started this project it was almost on a whim – Sarah gave me a bread baking class for Christmas. I was looking for inspiration for what my project for the year would be (Drawing? Music? Writing?), and bread making seemed like a fun, almost quirky, thing to do. I’m very thankful that I did it. I’ve developed an appreciation for bread’s texture, taste, crust and crumb, and even its remarkable history. I’m afraid I’m even a bit of a snob about it now (I’m onto you, restaurants: just because it’s warm doesn’t mean it’s good).
Each loaf is a unique work of hand craftsmanship, made solely for enjoyment through consumption. I gave away bread to at least three dozen people, and shared my bread at meals with least four dozen more. That in itself was a great reward.
Moving Forward
My four main breads (sourdough, lean, 9 grain and ciabatta) will remain a regular part of our lives now. I have ideas for new things I want to try and have a journal set up in the kitchen to continue to track my experiments and progress. But this is the last of the posts for this project. Thanks for tagging along!
Carl
Nothing left but crumbs.