The bet was about football and I lost badly. The cost was a homemade loaf, delivered to the winner every Sunday, for a month. I did not know how to make bread. I bought a starter, followed the Chad Robertson recipe from Tartine, and produced four loaves that were technically bread and nutritionally bricks.
Then something happened that I did not expect: I got interested in the failure. Why were my loaves dense? Why did the crust look right and the interior look wrong? What was I doing that the video I was watching did not tell me? I started keeping a small notebook next to the oven with hydration percentages and fermentation times. I ran experiments. I discovered that the flour I was buying was too soft. I switched. Loaves 8 and 9 were suddenly bread.
Two years later I make one or two loaves a week. I do not photograph them. I do not have a bread Instagram. It is the one thing I do in my kitchen that I would call practice, not performance. And the failure at the start was the whole point — if the first loaves had been good I would have stopped. Because they were bad and I could see why, I kept going.