You can do this

I first discovered the joy of baking bread four years ago, when my daughter was in second grade, and we decided to give her teachers fresh, homemade bread in the shape of a bear.

Like many other Americans, my experience with bread for most of the previous 36 years had been largely confined to what was on the shelves at the supermarket. Bread was something to be tolerated, spread with butter or covered with fixings. That bread itself could have a distinctive flavor was a new notion, as far as I was concerned.

But when my daughter and I tried one of our own loaves of buttermilk bread, I realized what I had been missing. To my taste buds, that first bite of homemade bread was a homecoming.

As I have discovered in the years since, bread is one of the most satisfying foods there is, and one of the most fundamental.

Sourdough is also the most natural form of bread. By using a live starter in which wild yeast can grow, you can make bread the way people did for thousands of years before baker's yeast became commercially available in the 19th century.

There are no great secrets to making a good loaf of sourdough bread. All you need are some basic ingredients, a few basic tools and the interest. If you can make bread, you can make sourdough bread.