Today I made garlic bread.
You add flour, water, salt, and most importantly, yeast. When baking bread, you have to let the dough rise.
No reasonable intervention will significantly increase the speed the dough rises for really good bread, possibly the best bread in the world.
No matter how much you yell at the bread, the dough will only rise to the sufficient amount after a given amount of time.
If you go to the store for the mass distributed stuff, the copy pasted churned brand, whatever it is, will never compare to homemade bread.
If you get the store bought stuff, it’s optimized for shelf life, which always detracts from the quality of the immediacy of the homemade stuff.
If you go to a bakery, it’s better, but never as good as the manual kneading you can do for yourself for what you want.
Bread making is simple, and world-class bread making is even simpler than what you may think. Mostly because humans converge on the flavors, texture, and content of their perfect bread.
But world-class bread does have shared constants of quality you can get only from the best.
Flavorless bread is bland. I’m a huge fan of personal choices I get with the categorization one has under the term “garlic bread.”
“Garlic bread” gives me flexibility to experiment with some wild ingredients, knowing it’s always going to be delicious, just in different ways.