While I’m no stranger to baking basic homemade bread, I’ve decided to go back to the basics again and learn things from square one. From the recommendation of my friend and online forums, I purchased Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (BBA). Even after reading just the introduction I was more inspired to bake something inside the book.

After the success of my coworker’s bagels, I decided to venture on my own bagel adventure. Looking online, I found various recipes, all yielding deliciously looking bagels. I opted to go with Reinhart’s method, which was very similar to one of the other recipes I found online at thebreadtechnique.com.

I was going to start my adventure last night by making the sponge, but I soon realized that I did not have any high-gluten/protein flour, and only had all-purpose, and cake and pastry flour-which as every baker should know-is not the same as bread flour.

So, skipping last night’s adventure, today, I am off to the local health food store, where I hope to find some high-protein flour (unbleached hard spring wheat flour is what was recommended, with up to 14% protein content), and the ever so-hard-to-find diastatic malt powder.

This latter ingredient, I tried to find at Pusateri’s and Whole Foods. To my dismay, neither place knew what I was talking about. Granted, I believe Whole Foods did have a bottle of barley syrup, which is considered a suitable replacement.

Equipped with those key ingredients, I hope to make the sponge tonight, retard the dough overnight, and bake tomorrow morning; probably the best way to start off a day!

Just a note, Reinhart’s book is packed with lots of great educational information that I absolutely love it. He actually makes the bread topic very interesting. Not only does it come with recipes-or forumulas-he takes care to explain the science behind why things happen. I love that about cookbooks, and thus will highly recommend this book for any baker wanting to get into the bread baking adventure.