For some of you, this isn't going to make much sense. Everyone is always asking me how I came to be a baker, and I think that there are some out there like me, so I thought I'd tell you how I came to be in the position I am, so that you can benefit from my experience and intellectual superiority.
I am a baker because it MAKES NO SENSE to go to the store to pay $3 or more for a product I can duplicate in my home kitchen for pennies. It MAKES NO SENSE to be limited to the selection of baked goods offered in the corner store. By baking my own bread, I can control what goes into it, and I don't understand why other people wouldn't make the same effort.
It MAKES NO SENSE to support the industrialization of a craft that belongs to the hearth and home. I just truly cannot understand why someone would prefer the pallid crumb and spongy texture of store-bought bread to the richly flavored, firm-crusted loaves I can make out of flour, yeast, and water. I have never understood non-bakers, and I'm tired of being forced to live in their world. I can't understand that there are people in this world who think bread's natural state is in a plastic bag with a twist tie. I mean, come on! That MAKES NO SENSE! How did it get there?
Among you bakers out there, just letting you know that if you use a stand-mixer instead of hand-kneading, you can't really call yourself a baker. You may be on the bottom rung to becoming a baker, but come on, get over yourself. You call that baking?
And, for the love of King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour, if you try to explain why unschooled, vacuous ninnies go to the store and buy bread, pre-sliced and full of preservatives, consider yourself troll rated. I won't tolerate discussion of this side of the baked-goods debate. However, fellow bakers, if my story is your story, if you thrill to watch your handiwork rise on the counter and feel just a wee soupcon of judgmental superiority when you make your kids' lunches on your homemade bread, let me know, and feel free to judge and ridicule the dummies who pay for store-bought bread and feed it to their children.
Oh, and if you think this diary is as out of place on Daily Kos as diaries that serve only to divide Kossacks into theists and atheists, feel free to ignore it.