Basic White Bread

I’ve always been kind of wary of yeast.

It tastes terrible if you eat it straight, it smells kind of weird when it gets wet and it’s inherently fiddly.

And I’ve tried making bread before. Let’s just say, my family has always been very tolerant of my mistakes and will eat them no matter what, but my past attempts have been absolutely terrible.

I’ve been scared to try again. As it goes with a lot of my cookbooks, I suck up all the information and pore over the books and scour the recipes and absorb the stories a lot of them carry along.

I want to make great food for my family. I am normally excellent at making food for my family, but why am I so scared to go beyond the basic Instant Pot recipes and things I’ve been making forever?

Maybe it’s the time I set the stove on fire while attempting fried green tomatoes when I was 14. I melted the microwave shut and scorched the ceiling.

Maybe it’s the time I made pasta so gummy that only my dad would choke it down and pretend to like it.

Maybe it’s all the times I’ve tried bread.