Yesterday I baked bread. It isn’t hard to do. It mostly consists of waiting around between a series of small tasks. Since I work from home, it’s really a matter of setting a kitchen timer and periodically nipping over from the office to the house to attend to the next stage.

I have temporary custody of my mom’s KitchenAid mixer and it makes the whole process incredibly easy — that and a terrific recipe for whole-wheat bread from the March/April issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. (Thanks to my brother-in-law for the gift subscription to CI a couple of years ago. It has changed my life.) I used to have a bread machine, which made things even easier, but it didn’t do as good a job of kneading as the KitchenAid.

Funny, although I love baking bread and eating freshly baked homemade bread, I rarely buy or eat it from a store. My ultimate goal with taking up bread baking again now is to re-create the fabulous “Zuricher Loaf” you can get in any Swiss-German bakery. My dad was on a similar quest when I was a kid and frequently served up his latest efforts for Sunday breakfast. He had a knack for breadmaking and the taste of a warm slice of his bread with butter melting on top is a favorite childhood memory. He didn’t write down his recipes, unfortunately.

I’ve searched my collection of Swiss cookbooks and the internet for the exact combination of ingredients in a Zuricher Loaf, but to no avail. My next step is to work my way, one-by-one, through the recipes in a book I have on European breads. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.