Crackling Artisan Bread

A plain loaf of dough, with a snip of the scissors and a rest in a banneton, has a kooky panache when baked off.

The Village Baking Company in Dallas had a message on their chalkboard: "Bread is meant to be loved, not to be understood." It was signed, "The Oven."

Though many of us do enjoy the scent of a freshly baked loaf - we don't understand how to get our hands on it. And make no mistake: we want it.

Bread is the king of the table, novelist Louis Bromfield wrote, and "all else is merely the court that surrounds the king. The countries are the soup, the meat, the vegetables, the salad, but bread is king.”

The Dallas Morning News helped me explore this idea of something beyond our reach in a story called "The Easiest Bread Ever." Find the images by Evans Caglage and story with photography slide show and video here. 

It's a "good news" story, a starting point for a long and wonderful journey with no end in sight (but who would want one?). Using just four ingredients - flour, water, salt and yeast - you can easily get the look, the feel, the scent of the thing in your own kingdom.

Chalk that up.