Don't get my wrong, though, it takes a long time from the point where I first start getting the ingredients out until the cooled loaves are wrapped and stored. But for the majority of the time -- say three to four hours typically, the dough is just sitting there doing its thing, which means I can do my own thing meanwhile. Say twenty minutes at the start to mix it up and set it to rise, then go away for an hour and come back for fifteen minutes, second rising another hour, work at it for another fifteen minutes, put in the oven bake 45-60 minutes and set it out to cool. Little-known secret: rising doesn't have to run an exact time -- I can put the dough up to rise and go out and run errands and come back when I get back and the bread will be OK. In fact, I'm learning the virtue of a really long, slow rising, like overnight long.
Usually I bake two loaves on a weekend session, and that lasts me two weeks, so every other Saturday (or Sunday) I arrange to have chores and short errands to be done and between items I work the dough.
I've experimented with many ingredients and varieties of bread, from plain home-style white bread loves that I made from my family's Christmas dinner to challah to dense, dark whole-wheat/barley/seven-grain breads that I love to match with pasta and light, spicy sauces. My conclusions so far -- as long as you have some wheat flour with plenty of protein to form the gluten -- you can throw just about anything else in there that sounds good and you'll get a nice loaf. Once I made a medium dark loaf with a good helping of plain oats, and it made for nice-looking slices with the little pale specks of the oats peppering the brown crumb.
There's a little restaurant here in Portland by the name of Cafe Lena, 2239 SE Hawthorne Boulevard. It's really tiny, and the kitchen is more-or-less sitting taking up the largest corner of the space, separated from the dining area by a wall low enough for even a below-average height male like myself to peek over. But I cannot find adjectives to fit my appreciation for their food (including vegetarian selections of tremendous variety) and their bread. Specifically, the challah, whose flavor and texture I've attempted to matched but failed so far. For breakfast I could eat nothing but that toasted, plain, dry. I might touch it with a little Marionberry jam for the healthy serving of fruit it provides, but it doesn't need it.
All in all, I've spoiled myself. The typical loaves you buy on the bread aisle of your local grocery are lightly-flavored, spongily-textured blocks cloned into too-perfect rows of slices, adequate for slathering on peanut butter and grape jelly but having too little substance, character, or subtlety to be appreciated for themselves or paired with foods finer and Chef-Boy-Ardee ravioli. They are the food equivalent of generic American yellow beer, and I've already lots my taste for that as a results of my homebrewing experiences.