"I always feel its is a labor of love," said Dabrielle Willis, whose family runs My Daily Bread in Cleveland. The family-run bakery uses fresh grains they grind for their loaves and also crafts custom-made bread made for special diets.

"There’s nothing like presenting it at the table. It is an art and a science," Willis added. "If you can do that for your family, it just shows them they are so important to you."

Willis said the family decided to start selling homemade bread in 2001, partly out of concern for her husband, who had a heart attack. She said they started looking for ways to get more nuts and fiber in their diet, and store-bought breads just weren’t cutting it. So, she said, the family started grinding their own flour and baking it within 72 hours, retaining most of the nutrients in the process.

Their breads can be found at Green’s Grocery in Gainesville, IGA in Clermont and at the Suwanee and Hall County farmers markets. Cool Beans Cafe in Oakwood also serves its sandwiches on their bread.

So, homemade bread is one way to get more nutrients — although, admittedly, home cooks may not want to take the time to grind their own flour. But even so, if you are making bread from scratch rather than buying it from the store, it’s a way to add specialty flours, nuts, whole grains and even dried fruit to your creation, and at the same time cut out preservatives or extra salt and sugar.

But bread isn’t something you just whip up. It is definitely a process.

On paper, the ingredients are simple — water, yeast, sugar, flour and salt. It’s the process that makes many home cooks avoid baking bread. You have to let it rise — twice — plus it takes about an hour to bake.

With just a little planning, though, you can work it into your schedule.

We took up the challenge recently to see if it’s possible to bake a couple of loaves in the midst of a family with both parents working and also tending to the needs of a toddler. And as it turns out, the process isn’t as complicated as it may seem.

The first thing to keep in mind is your schedule over the course of half a day or so. It seems a weekend morning works out best for bread making, where the first few steps of combining the ingredients and leaving them to rise can take place in a matter of about a half hour. Then, depending on your schedule for the next few hours, you can leave the dough in a warm place — we left the bowl on a heating pad, which made it rise in less than two hours — or in a cooler place if you know you’ll be out for a longer period of time.

Tim Roberts, Chef at 2 Dog Restaurant in Gainesville, recommended that cooks leave some time for kneading, though. Kneading the dough before it’s left to rise lets the flour, yeast and liquid mix thoroughly, he said.

"What you’re doing is you’re mixing in the yeast, you’re mixing in the salt and the flour and distributing everything within the flour," said Roberts, who supervises the production of about 30 to 40 pounds of bread a day at the restaurant.

He added that a crucial mistake home bakers often make is not adding enough water to the dough during the initial mixing process.

"You need a really sticky loaf in a sense when you’re first working with it," he said. "If you’re playing with it, it should stick to your hands."

After you’ve kneaded the dough for at least five minutes — Roberts and many recipes recommend kneading at least 10 minutes — you let it rest in an oiled bowl to rise.

Then, you go about your business for an hour or more. That’s the beauty of bread — you can tweak the rising time to fit your schedule.

When you have a few minutes, after the dough has about doubled in size, punch it down, knead it again for a few minutes, shape it into the style of loaf you want and plop it into a greased pan.

Then, go about your business for an hour or more. This time, it won’t take as long for the bread to rise, so you have to plan on sticking closer to home. But on a weekend afternoon, it’s enough time to sit down, eat lunch and let a toddler take a nap.

"Your second rise is the shaping rise, and that one you’re kneading it until the skin of the bread is literally like a baby’s butt," Roberts said. "It should have that texture and be soft; if you touch it, it will come back to you."

When the bread’s risen, pop it into a preheated oven for about an hour; in about 30 minutes your house will start smelling like warm, fresh bread.

"There is a lot involved. It does involve time," Willis said, adding that a lot of parents will come up to her, lamenting that they don’t have enough time to bake bread for their family.

So for anyone interested in baking bread but consumed by weekend activities, she recommends buying a bread machine.

And not an expensive one, either. "I’m talking about going to a thrift shop and finding a good working-order one," she said. "Test it first. Get a simple bread book ... it’s not like making it from scratch, but it’s simple."

But by making the bread yourself, she said, you have control over the ingredients and the nutritional value. Honey wheat bread from the store, for example, has honey from all over the world, and as a result it contains allergens from South America or Asia, not Northeast Georgia. But if you make your own bread using local honey, you get the added benefit of introducing your body only to local allergens.

But even Willis, who also uses local distilled water and eggs from their own chickens to make their breads, said she has her limits.

"Croissants," she said. "Croissants are something I’ll buy from someone else."