After a bit of shopping angst I have the right raw materials or equivalents to try to make my first loaf of white bread, and it’s underway.

All I had in the house was all-purpose flour, and the machine’s manual is insistent that that variety doesn’t have enough gluten to make the perfect bread. So I went down to Safeway and discovered that’s the only variety the store sells. “Rats,” I said, but then remembered that there’s a Down to Earth veggie market at the bottom of my hill. I trundled down there but discovered that, while they have lots of flours, none were specifically bread flours. They had a finely-ground whole wheat which the clerk assured me would work the same, but I didn’t feel comfortable with that, since the manual and the recipes I’ve seen made distinctions between the two varieties. I bought a couple of pounds of it for future use, but I wanted to find flour clearly labeled for bread making.

That was yesterday. Today I went to that teeny-tiny niche market known as the Pearl Harbor Commissary. Goodness! The place had way more kinds of flour than Safeway did, including Gold Medal’s Better for Bread. I bought two five-pound bags of the stuff and brought it home.

So I was ready to go, right? Ha! I had gone to one of the local used bookstores looking for a bread machine cookbook and found Bread Machine Bounty from Better Homes and Gardens. It was published in 1992 (an oddity: since it’s 18 years old the Resources pages have toll-free numbers but no websites; that looks really strange now), and all its recipes want shortening rather than oil. I have no shortening!

Fortunately I realized margarine = solid fat just like shortening, but I might have slightly overdone the amount (I used 2 tsp, which is the amount of shortening called for). I then added milk, the bread flour, sugar, salt and yeast. We’ll see what happens in about 3 hours.

I’m trying basic white bread; for one thing, if I’m gonna bake much I need to lay in a supply of things like brown sugar, molasses, raisins, and other stuff I currently don’t have lying around the pantry.

I’m excited to see the results!