I don’t make New Year’s resolutions as such, but this winter I did kind of decide that one of my goals for 2003 should be to learn how to bake bread.

I’m no great baker. I can make a decent pizza dough and pie crust, and I’ve even managed some banana bread in the past. But actual, normal bread - that’s a different thing altogether. All the “letting rise” and “punching down” and kneading, all the different kinds of flour you can use, all the variables involved (temperature, humidity, the alignment of the planets) seem to make bread baking an arcane art that I could never master.

The thing is that 1) I love the idea of being able to make my own bread, and 2) it can be pretty difficult to buy decent bread here in England. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been pretty spoiled in the bread department. Germany is the land of amazing bread, and Jeremy worked in an excellent bakery for most of his time in Freiburg, which meant that I had access to as much delicious bread as I could possibly eat.

I can deal with the squishy sandwich bread that is ubiquitous in England because that’s basically what I grew up with in America. But I did get quite accustomed to having an endless supply of organic brown bread at my fingertips in Germany. In fact, I fell in love with one particular kind of loaf from Jeremy’s bakery: Dinkel fein, a fine, moist bread made from the spelt flour that is so popular in southern Germany (and practically unheard of in the rest of the world).

I have pined for this bread for two years now, so when I saw organic spelt flour being sold in a shop near here, I resolved to quit my complaining and just learn how to make the bread for myself. The flour sat around in my kitchen until yesterday, when I plucked up the courage to get down to baking.

Below, you can see a picture of the results of my first attempt at making spelt bread. The loaf rose beautifully and developed a lovely brown crust. The inside was moist and fine, with not a trace of the dry crumbliness I feared. My only complaint would be that it tastes a bit yeastier than I would like - but that didn’t stop Jeremy and me from consuming half the loaf with dinner last night.

I figure it was probably just beginner’s luck. But luck or no, I’m bursting with a pride that I just had to share with the rest of the world. That is one fine loaf of bread.

Further reading…