I certainly didn't grow up with it. Neither Mom nor Dad was much interested in baking. We had Bisquick in the house--and a small sack of Gold Medal (white). That was about it. Often the dinner rolls we ate came from a Pillsbury tube that you'd open by smacking it on the edge of the counter. Pull out the pre-shaped dough. Put the dough on a baking sheet. Bake. Consume the resultant rolls in seconds.
As I've posted here before, I began baking our bread in about 1970 (the first year of our marriage), not because it tasted better (though it really did) but because it was cheaper. I had my (pathetic) salary as a middle school teacher; Joyce had her (pathetic) stipend as a teaching assistant at Kent State. And it was just cheaper to bake our own bread.
Gold Medal (white) flour. Packaged yeast. Sugar. Crisco. Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy!
In the summer of 1986--on a trip with my fourteen-year-old son to Alaska and the Yukon, exploring both sites in The Call of the Wild, which I taught to my 8th graders, and some family history (my great-grandfather had gone on the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897)--I acquired some (dry) sourdough starter in Skagway, AK. And that substance, as regular visitors to this site know, changed my life.
At first, it was just basic old white sourdough bread (Gold Medal flour).
But as the years have gone on (yes, the same starter is still alive), I have morphed into a flour-nerd and now have an entire section of one of our kitchen cupboards stuffed with varieties of flour I use for baking the multigrain bread I make pretty much every week (as my Facebook friends, to their sorrow, know because of the annoying pix I post each Sunday). The pic below shows the cabinet ...
Each metal container you see holds a different variety. Right now, that cabinet holds the following varieties of flour (in bags, in containers): buckwheat, soy, flaxseed meal, flaxseeds (whole), barley, graham, spelt, oat, brown rice, teff, kamut, millet, cornmeal, semolina, amaranth, quinoa. There are probably some others; I'm too lazy to go look--but you get the idea. In the pantry (not shown) are some 5-lb sacks of Bob's Red Mill organic white and organic whole wheat. (The little sacks you see above are also from Bob's Red Mill.)
Acquiring these varieties takes some doin'. Trips to Marc's, Heinen's, Acme, Mustard Seed, and (not often--I try to avoid it) Amazon.
Joyce has gracefully surrendered the entire cabinet (not to mention Sunday mornings in the kitchen) for my obsessions. And I try to reward her kindness with a couple of loaves, every week.
Obviously, we can't eat it all ourselves. So we unload some on our son and his family (their parakeet, Jet, loves the flaxseeds!). Consign some to the freezer. But I eat the bread for lunch and supper. Every day.
And we haven't had store-bought bread in decades.
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