Bacon & Eggs Need Homemade Bread.

Finding the perfect complement for fried eggs.

The old habit of eating a fry up breakfast on Sundays ( gosh, I could eat it most days ) is not so easy in a country that doesn't do fry ups. Honestly, even explaining what a fry up is garners me a few strange looks coupled with raised eyebrows.

As much as I used to complain about the bread we had in South Africa - white or brown toast bread mostly - I do miss it now. Not the pre packaged one but the one that we used to buy and put in the bread slicer ourselves. That rectangular box shaped loaf.

If it was freshly baked and still had that lovely gooey texture inside, it firmly begged to be covered with pats of butter and dollops of peanut butter and drizzled with syrup for better lubrication...

Anyway, toasted it was the perfect place mat for a fried egg. Plain and simple. Perhaps a bit of HP sauce and a speck of fried bacon and it morphed into a heavenly bit of a breakfast morsel.

So far the only toast bread we have bought here was a few years ago and tasted a bit processed and sweet. We got confirmation of how processed it was, when we once forgot it was in the bread container. After a two week stint of not being used, guess what...it still looked fresh and perky like the first day we opened the package. That did it for us. We threw away the toaster and with it the temptation to eat chemically enhanced bread.

We are now bread makers. Necessity taught us well. Buying a " Schwarzbrot " or as we would call it a Rye Bread is quite costly and a loaf can set you back almost 4 Euros. Bread rolls are also not cheap at +- 40 cents per roll and often they have no flavour at all. The processed ones that you can bake yourself are 40 cents for 6 and so full of chemicals that we'd go back to square one.

When we make our own bread, it costs us just under a Euro. Flour, yeast, salt and TLC is all that goes into our bread.

Nothing is constant in life and our homemade bread is no exception. Sometimes it tastes out of this world and other times it tastes and looks like a stone. But we are trying and like Gary Player used to say:" The more I practice the luckier I get..."

Once you've made homemade bread, there is no end to what you can make yourself:

• Jam
• Pasta
• Pizza

Perhaps, making certain foods ourselves is a mini-protest against the huge food producing conglomerates that sell us their wares as if it's the best thing since sliced bread...

Biggi