Day 126 - Rising to the Occasion

Making My Own Bread Dough, Instead of Buying Frozen

We are a family of carbo-haulics here. We go through a giant size loaf of bread each week, in addition to a loaf or two of home-baked italian bread. We eat pasta every Wednesday and each meal contains AT LEAST one carb item. For snacks, we like most anything of the starchy persuasion and consume Cheez-its and Goldfish like they're going out of style.

To say we like our breads is like saying George Bush is most incompetent leader in the history of the world: it's a slight understatement.

In fact, we like our breads so much that I buy one six-pack of frozen bread dough every two weeks. The dough is made who knows where, frozen, packaged in a plastic bag and then shipped in a refrigerated truck to Kroger where it sits some more in the freezer there. That's a whole lot of energy use just for me to have frozen bread dough.

The really sad news? I own a bread machine.

Mmhmm. It's not that I'm so busy I can't make time to knead bread. It's that I'm so lazy I can't dump flour and water into an electric box and push "start". Well, Sportacus from Lazy Town called and told me to get off my dead ass and start making my own dough. So I guess I will.

Savings:

Difficult to quantify, but I would guarantee it requires more energy to produce, package, ship and store the frozen bread dough than it would for me to make fresh dough in my bread machine.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

It's actually really easy to make the bread dough in the machine. The hard part is REMEMBERING to make it ahead of time so that it has time to rise and cook before supper. I guess I could make up a dozen bread dough loaves on a Sunday and freeze them myself. That just feels so June Cleaver-ish, though.