Buttermilk Bread

I have been making homemade bread for years, and watched my mom make it for years before that, but I learned something new about the whole process recently. Apparently, adding just a pinch of ginger to the yeast mixture when starting your bread makes the yeast go crazy! I have never seen yeast bloom like it did when I used ginger in with the sugar/yeast/water mixture. I highly recommend giving this recipe a try because the bread and rolls I made were tender, fluffy, soft ... perfect!

Buttermilk Bread

I used half the dough to make rolls and half to make a loaf:

Naturally I tried to find out why the ginger affected the yeast the way it did, and this website had a pretty good explanation. (At the link, scroll down to the final answer to the question.) In a nutshell, ginger keeps the pH at the optimum level for yeast growth.