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Unlocking the Secrets of “Ed Bread”
In college, I hung around with a small group of techie friends who shared my interests in computers, the bright lights of the future, and inevitably, food. To stave off home-sickness, every few weeks we gathered together for a home-cooked meal. Typically, someone would bring a main dish, someone else would bring sodas, and someone would bring bread. Then, over a few hours, we’d stuff ourselves silly and share some truly terrible — and some not so terrible — stories and ideas.
If I am truthful, however, it wasn’t ever just “someone” who brought bread. It was always Ed. While the rest of us could fumble our way through generic Italian cuisine or some god-awful concoction of questionable ethnic origin, Ed was a baking savant and could always dial the night up a few notches with a few loaves of awesomeness. Even decades later, it’s hard to think about bread without flashing back to those dinners featuring tasty morsels of “Ed Bread.”
These days, having been cooped up in a coronavirus stay-in-place order for the past several weeks, I decided to try my hand at making bread. Unlike my buddy Ed, who seemed to intrinsically understand these things and could throw all sorts of things in the oven and produce miracles worthy of the hushed voices of angels, I am clearly more adept at creating food massacres than edible treats. Therefore, I carefully consulted the…
