If Wonder Bread and other ready-made bread companies spend billions of dollars in advertising, then they should allot several millions to advertise exclusively to me because the gap between their products and my wallet is expanding like the universe.

Yes, they totally lost my business now and only some real ‘dough’ can make me go back to their forever-fresh-chemically–enriched bread products.

Thanks to the Internet, I now know how to make my own bread.

Making bread is a joy. The process is laborious and, like life, unfair. I say unfair because the amount of time and work needed to make bread does not equal the actual lifespan of the bread itself. After taking the bread out of the hot oven, it barely experiences the thrill of being. It doesn’t even have time to cool. Instead, it gets ripped, dunked in sauce, slathered with butter, stuffed in mouth, chewed, swallowed, and digested. A goner.

Almost 24 hours working on bread that will only exist for three minutes.

Unfair, but nevertheless, beautiful.

I am addicted to bread making, I must confess.

When I knead my dough with pure tenderness, I sometimes see Sheryl Mae looking intently at me, perhaps wishing that I were kneading her aching back instead of the glutinous mass.

I ceased to care about other things rising as long as my dough rises well.

I proof my dough better than I can ever prove a triangle.

So what have I learned so far? So far, in my quest to make my own bread and bolt out of the industrial supply of bread that never dies, I learned to make baguettes, French rolls, Ciabatta, cinnamon raisin oat bread, croissant, chocolate rolls, and pastry bread. I am yet to try my own pizza dough using the infamous ‘no-knead’ bread.

I look at bread differently now. It makes sense that in Turkey, bread is considered holy. In Turkey, you can throw your spouse on the street, but never left over bread– not even a crumb.

likewise, anything can be dirty, but bread. So if you accidentally drop a piece of bread on the pavement, you can come back the next day for it and it will still be clean. You even can soak it in grime and paint and it will still be clean.

I think we should view bread in the same way, or for that matter, all forms of food–well, except perhaps, anything that resembles chicken nuggets and bread that has eternal shelf life.