Over at Culinate there’s a nice piece by Zanne Miller about making bread with her daughters. What’s interesting is that it was the daughters who instigated the family bread-making, Miller herself admits to thinking that it was going to be too hard, or take too long, or be a pain. It’s a lovely piece about how it’s become part of their family routine.

Now that the weather has cooled off I’ve been making bread again — mostly the no-knead, although I need to go look up the some-knead hybrid I cribbed from Nancy Silverton last week (reminds me, I need to add wheat germ to my shopping list too). It’s not the time-consuming earth-mother chore that people tend to think it is — you can make a delicious loaf of nice clean bread that contains only flour, salt, water, and yeast in two or three short sessions of actual cooking. Bob del Grosso also has a simple bread recipe over at Hunger Artist, and here’s a story in the Times of London about why commercial bread makes you fat and feel terrible, while real bread doesn’t.

What I loved about the piece at Culinate is how Miller and her kids started out with breadmaking as a sort of craft project, and then found it creeping into their lives for the best of the Slow Food reasons — it was something fun they could do together, it gave them a chance to talk to one another while making dinner, and it gave the little girls a sense of mastery over a basic skill. I think that’s why I take such pleasure in making a loaf of bread once a week or so — even if it is just the dead-easy no-knead loaf — people have been making bread for a couple of thousand years, it’d be a shame to see it become some kind of esoteric lost skill.