Happy June, everyone! What a lovely weekend it has been. Last week I felt like I was constantly in sleep debt, but it seems that a good cure for that is to sleep for 10 hours multiple nights in a row (I guess it makes sense). Now that I am feeling normal again, I am ready for a challenge, and we’ve got a doozy.

This month, June of 2013, Dave and I aren’t buying any bread. Not because of gluten issues or any type of diet – the idea is to *make* all of our bread for the month at home. That’s right. For an entire month! We are the type of people who usually buy a loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread every week, plus English muffins or bagels, plus we frequently pick up a baguette to go with dinner, because a good baguette is one of the best foods known to man. So it will be a bit of a challenge!

In fact, it has already presented some challenges. Even though I made two loaves of bread this week, this afternoon I thought about having hamburgers for dinner, and well, we don’t have hamburger buns. The hamburgers must wait until another day when I can bake.

Why do the challenge? Well, I think there are a couple of good things to explore, while we do this:

– Commercial sandwich bread has not always been available like it is now, and it stays fresh for a VERY long time. How different is that from a bread you’d make at home? Is it still easy to eat before it becomes stale?

– I still remember the first bite of store-bought salsa I ate after we ran out of our home-canned salsa… the store stuff tasted like frosting because it was full of added sugar. I am wondering about the difference between home-baked and store-bought, sweetness-wise.

– Since bread is a large contributor to our diet, it seems like a good way to be mindful of how often we consume it.

– I am excited to finally devote some time and repetition to finding a good, consistent sandwich bread recipe. Because right now, I don’t have one.

I started this weekend by making two loaves of bread – one sweet loaf of chocolate brioche for breakfasts and one loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread. The results were, uh, varied.

Here’s the brioche:

Tall, happy, beautiful. The recipe was perfect and the bread is perfect. Oh, I did double the chocolate chips.

And then here’s the whole wheat.

Uh, yeah. Underwhelming. It’s somewhere between 3-4 inches tall. It’s dense. It does taste good, but considering the fact that I used a recipe from a source that I usually trust (I won’t name names), I am really disappointed with how it turned out (I even did everything by weight!).

It should also be noted that I made these two loaves within an hour of each other, with the same jar of yeast, so all atmospheric and ingredient conditions are exactly the same. So what went wrong?

That is part of what I mean to find out this month. In the meantime, here is a perfect recipe for delicious brioche.

Allow 4 hours from start to finish.

• 2 1/2 tablespoons milk, warmed just a bit
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp. yeast
• 2 1/4 cups AP flour
• 2 Tbps. cocoa
• 1 tsp. salt
• A few shakes of freshly-ground pepper
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 3 eggs
• 1 stick butter, room temperature or very slightly warmer.

In a small bowl, mix the warm milk with the sugar and yeast and set aside for 5-10 minutes until the mixture is foamy.

In a mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the flour, cocoa, salt, pepper and chocolate chips. With the mixer on medium, beat in the yeast mixture. Next, add in the eggs, one at a time. Finally, reduce the speed to low, and add in the butter, one pad (1 tbsp. ish) at a time.

Move the dough to a greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Allow to rise in a warm place for two hours.

Next, move the dough to a greased loaf pan and cover yet again (this time you might want to spray the plastic wrap with nonstick spray). Allow to rise for another 45 minutes. Towards the end of the rise time, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Bake for 35 minutes, or until the loaf reaches an internal temperature of 190 degrees.