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By David Futrelle

Let’s say you’re a blogger and YouTube dude who loves bread, and who has recently gotten all excited about baking bread at home with the help of a cheap bread machine. So excited, in fact, that you can’t wait to show off your new baking prowess to the world.

Let’s say that you’re also deeply insecure about your masculinity and terrified that if you confess to the sin of … baking, all your fans will turn on you and denounce you as some sort of girly wuss because BAKING IS FOR GIRLS.

What on earth do you do?

Well, if your name is Roosh Valizadeh, you make a video proclaiming that yes, you love baking bread but only because baking is a highly scientific endeavor that’s not girly or wussy at all.

I missed Roosh’s video when he first put it out nearly two years ago. But it’s been making the rounds on Twitter again and so I thought you all might appreciate Roosh’s extremely manly take on the Unbearable Dudeness of Bread Making.

In case you don’t have the patience to sit through the entire 18 minutes, here’s the gist of it:

Roosh begins his video by announcing, with a mixture of bravado and cowardice, that he likes to bake bread, a fact you might think his viewers would have already gathered from the title of his video “How I make my own bread at home with a bread machine.”

But apparently this is a bit of a sensitive subject for Roosh. “Yes I am outing myself as a baker, as someone who likes to cook” he declares.

I’m not a woman. I am ultra-masculine, as you can see. But baking and cooking in general is a scientific thing and men like scientific things.

ROOSH NOT WOMAN, BREAD IS SCIENCE!

I used to be a a scientist and baking my own bread which I’m going to show you how is one of the most joyful things that I can do at home.

NO, NO, GUYS i’M NOT A SISSY GIRLY COOK, I AM A MANLY BREAD SCIENTIST, A SCIENTIST OF BREAD!

After babbling on for a bit about how store-bought bread is too expensive and filled with chemicals and boy oh boy does he love the smell of freshly baked bread and having his own bread machine has “completely changed” his life, Roosh demonstrates his baking process. Which consists of putting a bunch of ingredients in his bread maker and turning it on. There’s no dough-kneading or anything like that. He’s less of a baker than a pourer of bread ingredients into a machine.

But he narrates the whole process in detail, I guess to help out those who are somehow incapable of reading a list of ingredients. It gets a little weird.

The first step is I add two spoons, two spoons of olive oil and the oil keeps it moist, it really slows down the staleness process and also gives it a richer taste. I then add 330 milliliters of lukewarm water and water obviously you need water for bread and I heat it just for a minute on the stovetop to ensure that it is warm but if you have a microwave you can do it that way to make sure it’s not too hot because then you’re gonna kill the yeast.

Thanks, dude, I don’t think I could have figured out how to heat water up a little bit without your helpful assistance!

Next up we got to feed the yeast, and if you don’t know yeast is the organism that creates the holes in the bread, makes it light and but they need food and the food for yeast is is sugar, so I put 18 grams total of sugar. And then of course the most important ingredient is the flour. I put 500 grams and as you can see I’m weighing everything so if I make a good batch of bread I really want to be able to duplicate it so when you weigh it you get the most precise measuring possible so that you can easily duplicate anything.

Er, isn’t that what recipes are for? We humans have been baking bread for nearly 15,000 years — bread actually predates agriculture by several thousand years. I mean, I think we’ve kind of got this bread thing figured out. No need for Bread Scientist Roosh to do any elaborate experiments on this front.

Anyway, Roosh goes on to add yeast and salt, as one does, and then lets the machine work its magic.

But evidently he hasn’t quite got the Bread Science quite right yet because this is the result:

Now I’m not the winner of the Nobel Prize for bread or anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what a loaf of bread is supposed to look like. The top is not supposed to be concave, and also shouldn’t it be a little bit darker, like the rest of the crust? This is just … wrong.

HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT A BREAD MACHINE CHANGED YOUR LIFE WHEN THE BREAD YOU MAKE WITH IT LOOKS LIKE THIS SHIT?

Roosh, to his credit, realizes that there is something a little bit off with his loaf.

You see there is a problem — my bread it cratered a bit, so the middle came down, and from the research I’ve been doing online it’s either because there’s too much water or too much yeast so for the next loaf I decided to lower the amount to three grams instead of 4.5.

Here is the new, more scientifically advanced loaf:

DUDE THAT IS STILL NOT RIGHT

Now the top is, it’s flat but I still want that rounded top so I’m probably gonna even lower the yeast a little bit more but this is the fun of baking.

THAT IS NOT THE FUN OF BAKING

It’s science so you change one thing each time and see what the result is this is very similar to when I used to work as a scientist at two biotech firms I would actually make food for microbial and mammalian cells and I would change one thing to see the effects of the food how the yeast would actually grow because I grew these cells and this is almost the exact same thing except I can eat the product after that

IT IS NOT ALMOST THE EXACT SAME THING, YOU ARE MAKING FOOD FOR HUMANS NOT FOR MICROBES

and so as you can see my excitement for growing bread is really high

DUDE DID YOU JUST SAY “GROWING BREAD,” WHY DID YOU SAY GROWING BREAD, BREAD IS NOT GROWN, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE, ARE YOU A SPACE ALIEN OH GOD THAT WOULD EXPLAIN SO MUCH

because it’s just, it’s cool, it’s a good way to also challenge myself. I mean it’s not a big challenge but, can I make a good loaf?

NO YOU CANNOT MAKE A GOOD LOAF, YOU HAVE PROVIDED PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE THAT YOUR LOAVES ARE NOT GOOD.

You know, can I take a basic recipe and tweak it so that it turns out great and the people who have been eating the bread I make they say it tastes great

WHO ARE THESE ALLEGED PEOPLE, PLEASE PROVIDE PROOF OF THEIR EXISTENCE, OH GOD YOU PROBABLY CAN’T, YOU PROBABLY ATE TEHM, YOU PROBABLY KILLED THEM AND THREW THEM INTO A GIANT YEAST KIT IN YOUR BASEMENT, IS THE NAME OF YOUR COOKBOOK BY ANY CHANCE “TO SERVE MAN?”

Weirdly, as gross as Roosh is, and as badly as his loaves turned out, I find myself wondering if maybe I should get a bread machine for myself. I mean, I love bread, and I certainly couldn’t do a worse job making it than Roosh has here.

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