white bread

It's Monday. I continue to float through the vacuum of unemployment, lost and alone. I bought a three-dollar bottle of wine from CVS yesterday. I still have no idea what I'm doing with my life.

I'm putting all of that aside for now. We need a new theme to go with our brand new week, and if I don't pick one out, nobody will. Today, we're taking on a task that's slightly more challenging than trail mix: bread. The kind you have to let sit for a minute before you put it in the oven. That's right, you guessed it. White Bread Week, bitches. I'm hungry as hell.

This recipe is from one of my favorite blogs of all time, fork&beans. To say that I'm obsessed with this woman is an understatement. She makes me want to lose fifteen pounds and get my life together.

This version of her sandwich bread will be performed here for you with, of course, a few slight modifications on my part, the two most prominent adjustments being the types of flour used and the fact that I cut the recipe in half. The original calls for five different varieties of flour. Five god damn varieties. I own three, and none of them are on this list. But that's never stopped me before.

one cup of brown rice flour

one half of a cup of corn starch

four tablespoons of coconut flour

one half of a teaspoon of baking powder

one fourth of a teaspoon of baking soda

one and a half tablespoons of instant yeast

one half of a cup of warm almond milk

one half of a cup of warm water

two and a half tablespoons of ground chia seeds

one and a half tablespoons of coconut oil

one teaspoon of apple cidar vinegar

one half of a teaspoon of salt

Bread is something I've never even attempted in my life. This process was honestly so fascinating to me despite the fact that I only did a mediocre job. You'll see how it went. I'm really excited about this one.

Preheat your oven to 350°. Just get it out of the way before you forget. Prepare yourself for step one: hydrating the yeast.

The original recipe calls for dry active yeast, which requires an additional step before it can give the bread rise; basically, you have to let it soak in some sort of warm liquid with a bit of sugar for about ten minutes. This gives the yeast two things: fuel to grow, and an environment within which it is able to multiply. Dry active yeast is baking yeast for adults. All they had at the store I went to though was instant yeast, which just goes in dry with the flour. I was torn. Is there a difference? I needed to think of a solution, fast. I decided to go halfway; I tossed fifty percent in with the dry ingredients, and I activated the remaining portion with the warm almond milk. I don't know how much of an effect that may or may not have had on the final product, and quite frankly I don't want to know. I can't be bothered. The naysayers will say what they will, I say let god sort them out.

Let the yeast sit. Whisk together your dry ingredients in the meantime. This is going to sound dumb as hell but at this stage the mixture smelled so amazing to me. Like, my face was in the bowl. I have no idea why. I think I might be slowly going insane with nothing to do all day. It was like heaven. I was huffing it like paint thinner.

Stir the oil, vinegar, water, and chia seeds in with the yeasty concoction you made ten minutes ago; it should definitely look significantly different than it did at the beginning of the process. If it doesn't, your yeast is dead and you won't be able to make bread with us today. My condolences.

Leave the wet bowl alone for approximately five minutes, just to let the chia egg set. After that, dump your wet ingredients into the flour mixture. Fold with a spatula until just combined.

Oh my god. I look at this photo and I can just smell the bodacious scent of the yeast, alive and festering within the flesh of the lump. I love science. Divide into six pieces and grab a spoon.

I don't know whether or not I mentioned this yet, but I do not own a proper bread pan. I am not the type of person who has a knitting circle or a bible group to roll with. I have no need for a vessel to bake coffee cakes in for afternoon tea with the ladies; the occasion simply never comes up. In addition to that, this recipe was sort of done on a whim; I had no time to run out and grab one before breaking ground. And I certainly wasn't about to bake bread in a pie plate.

In the end, I improvised a little and decided to bake the bread in muffin tins. This guaranteed me the lowest probability of failure; with only an inch and half separating the deepest part of the muffins from the outside world, I would be able to bake them all evenly in the shortest amount of time possible. The plan was fool-proof, or so I thought.

This is them after rising for a bit. Isn't this exciting? The yeast culture has formed a unique society inside of each one. Isn't that interesting?

Something you may or may not have noticed about me as a person: I fuck things up, a lot. This is due both to a shallowness I acquired in college and also to a much lower-than-average IQ that probably is a result of the fact that the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck when I was born via cesarean section.

The bone-headed thing I ended up doing this time? I set the stove timer to keep track of the rising period and at the end of the allotted thirty minutes I stopped the clock and also inadvertently shut down the 350° oven I had cookin' in the meantime. I stuck the muffins in for an hour before realizing they were only baking in residual heat.

After a moment of intense self-loathing, I put them back in at a properly-lit temperature for an additional fifteen minutes and they browned up just as well. Whatever. It's fine.

My big idea was slicing the muffins into cross sections to create "bread slices." The truth: they were definitely on the denser side as far as baked goods go and sort of crumbled apart against the knife when I tried to do this in actuality. The crumbs only fueled my bloodlust for these things, however. Despite my mistakes, I was in hog heaven.

Something really stupid about me: I fucking love bread. It was probably my favorite food before I went gluten-free and decided that enjoying life isn't all that important to me anymore. This recipe satisfied a hankering that had been gnawing away at my insides for months on end unchecked. I believe SJWs call this type of thing, "self-care."

I think they taste fucking delicious. My mom was gagging as I took them out of the oven; that's how allergen-free these things are. And unfortunately for her, that's just how I like it. Sorry, mom.

To be fair, I have not had bread in a very long time. To most normal human beings, these would probably taste ridiculous, but to me they're better than sex. I could think of a million things to do with them. I'm tingling at the possibilities.

These honestly turned out more like scones or crumpets than anything, but fuck off. They're fucking bread. I stacked up the medallions in a trash bag. It's just like having a real loaf of bread from the store.