Whole Wheat Bread Experience

The idea for The Handmade Bread Project stemmed from two different inspirations. It started with researching the significance that bread has had on human history and the evolution of baking. Bread in the past has been just as valuable as money, often ancient people were be paid in bread. So when I first started baking bread, I thought about how our ancestors had baked bread, and how it meant so much to their lives and how our current culture has lost the value of food, and lost the value of making one's own food. At the time I started baking, I was also spending a lot of time on a computer and ordering much of my food out, and stepping away from that screen, using my hands and taking several hours out of my day to just work flour, dough between my fingers, really became a meditation process for me. Not only was the experience relaxing, but I began to realize how making my own food, very literally became a part of who I was, once I consumed it, and how what we eat, really does become who we are, and taking time to appreciate the food means appreciating yourself. The rhythm and beauty of baking became the inspiration for my book. In these epiphanies I discovered not only a tangle and visible beauty of simple ingredients, but I discovered a spiritual beauty in rhythm, meditation and hand made experience that baking is.