Inspired by a brother who insists baking bread by weight beats volume, I freestyled this recipe. It’s about as simple as bread gets (and, often, as complex as it needs to be).

Two baguettes, one with rosemary

Ingredients

600 g flour
450 g water
1 T. yeast
1 T. salt

Mix dry ingredients. Add water and blend until combined. Turn out onto counter and knead roughly to aerate. (Here, I used an abusive no-flour kneading technique from a video sent by the same brother. Hard to describe.) Form into ball, dust with flour and put in bowl to rise. When doubled — about 90 minutes — turn out on to lightly floured counter. Divide in two and lightly knead each. Form into baguettes. (During the forming, I added chopped fresh rosemary to one.) Set on baking sheet dusted with cornmeal. Preheat oven to 425. Bake until golden, about 25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Notes

I haven’t baked bread in a while, mostly because the sourdough starter I used beginning last January quit cooperating. As I consistently baked barely edible bricks, I lost mojo. Not a good thing for a baker.

This batch helped restore some of that confidence. The crust was crunchy and golden and the insides were light, airy and fully done. I used about 3 T. of rosemary in one, and could have used a pinch more to give a more pronounced taste. My biggest criticism: The loaves were a tad salty. Overall, though, these turned out pretty damn good for making it up as I went along, and went a long way toward boosting that mojo.

My better – and more sensible – half recently got us a Costco card. I’ve mixed feelings on membership clubs. Not everything you buy in feeding-trough proportions amounts to a good deal. Some items do. Thus, I have a healthy skepticism as to whether the cost of membership is worth the benefit.

Take today’s visit. The cereal we use was pricier, juice a mixed bag and flour a bargain. It’s the last item I want to focus on, spurred by this article on The New York Times site arguing for a green tomorrow through baby steps today.

Both my regular readers know I’ve been baking bread. A lot. Given the volume, buying bulk flour makes sense. At Trader Joe’s, a 5 pound bag of flour costs about $3.50, or 70 cents per pound. That’s cheaper than buying bread at Joe’s, where one loaf can set you back that much. Still, I know the wisdom of bulk from buying at co-ops in the past.

Which brings me back to Costco, where a 25 pound bag weighs in at just $9.49. For those penny-tight-wads out there (like me), that’s 38 cents per pound, or almost 46 percent cheaper. Cha-ching!

Inspired by Michael Pollan’s Times piece, which talks about growing your own vegetables, I crunched a few numbers. Assuming about four cups per pound, 25 pounds comes to 100 cups. I use about six and a half cups per batch. Rounding down, that’s roughly 15 batches. Each batch yields three small loaves. So, for that $9.49, I’m getting about 45 loaves at around 21 cents per loaf.

All this flowery math doesn’t account for feeding the starter I have. Its hunger could eat into the savings, pushing the per-loaf cost up to maybe 25 cents.

It also doesn’t account for the electricity used in baking, which admittedly could be substantial. On the other side of the green balance sheet, I can’t know how much gas cooking at home could save. Remember: If you got it, a truck brought it. For argument’s sake, let’s say those two things cancel each other out. Humor me.

Being able to provide bread for my modest household for under a quarter a loaf is a good feeling. I don’t know if it’s virtuous, as Pollan might hope, but it does re-engage me with the origin of a staple food. That, Pollan might say, makes one baby step toward conservation.

Next step: a victory garden.

A couple days ago, I put together the second batch from my sourdough starter. I wanted to peck out a couple notes on it, now that I’ve had a chance to sample the product.

Two changes: first, I stepped up the flour a little more than I planned; second, I baked in a bread pan for the first time in I don’t remember how long (I’m usually a button-loaf guy).

The dough slid a bit more toward spongy than goopy, which is what I’ve worked with most recently

Yesterday I freestyled sourdough bread from my own starter. It has a mild sour taste, but I have to work on my proportions. I’ve too much water. The loaf splayed out into a shape reminiscent of a Frisbee (with a slightly peaked dome).

I’ve been baking bread regularly since the beginning of the year. The recipe I’ve used comes from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. It’s a wonderful book with a brilliant shortcut to making bread: Make a bunch of dough beforehand, and keep it chilled. When you’re ready to bake, tear off a glob, form it and bake at 450 degrees until done.

Their recipe falls into the idiot-proof category. Broken down to atoms, it is: a little more than twice as much flour as water, and for every two cups of flour, a half tablespoon of both yeast and salt. For instance, you might use just over six cups of flour, three cups of water, and a tablespoon and a half of yeast and salt. Those proportions have been yielding three loaves over a week and a half that are ample to feed two people. It’s simple and easily scaled up or down, and the dough keeps for almost two weeks.

After two months of baking this recipe, two things happened. First, my bread-baking confidence grew. Second, I ran out of yeast. The natural extension of both those situations: Culture a sourdough sponge. One part flour, one part warm water, and I was on my way.

After a few days of feeding, stirring and nursing it, it had the requisite bubbles and looked like pancake batter. Good. On to the next step