Homemade Bread Day

What the day is

Homemade Bread Day is observed on November 17. It encourages you to bake your own bread, whether that is a simple loaf, a quick soda bread or a long-fermented sourdough. The day is informal, with no documented founder, and it fits the season, when the oven is welcome and a warm kitchen is an advantage.

Baking bread is easier than its reputation suggests. A basic loaf needs flour, water, salt and yeast, and most of the time involved is waiting rather than working.

Origin and background

Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods. Archaeologists working in northeastern Jordan found the charred remains of flatbread baked about fourteen thousand years ago, thousands of years before farming began, which suggests that people were grinding and baking wild grains long before they planted any. Leavened bread appeared later, probably in ancient Egypt, where bakers discovered that fermented dough would rise.

For most of history bread was baked at home or in a village oven. Industrial milling and sliced, packaged bread in the twentieth century made it cheap and convenient, and bread baking at home declined. It has since come back in waves, boosted by bread machines, sourdough starters and the no-knead method popularized in 2006, which showed that a long, slow rise could replace kneading altogether.

Few things in cooking reward a beginner as quickly. Even a plain loaf comes out better than most store bread, and the smell alone is worth the effort.

How to take part

• Bake a simple no-knead loaf: mix flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast, rest it overnight and bake it in a covered pot.
• Make a quick bread, such as soda bread or banana bread, if you want a result without waiting.
• Start a sourdough starter and feed it for a week, which takes only a few minutes a day.
• Share a loaf with a neighbor or bring one to a gathering.
• Weigh your ingredients with a kitchen scale, the single change that improves most home baking.