Like most people, I started baking bread during the first lockdown. At first, it was soothing - a kneading distraction and fresh bread on the table on Sundays. Then it got complicated. I urgently needed different proofing baskets and flour from French mills and spent a lot of time on bread forums online, where people took their sourdough starter with them on their honeymoon. My kitchen oven annoyed me with its temperature fluctuations and I annoyed my family with dough-related mood swings. Suddenly, baking bread was no longer an endearing project for a Sunday, but a serious hobby, almost stressful. And yet there is a great bakery in my street. When I went back there six months later and was able to exchange good bread for coins without any complications, without having to set an alarm clock or heave a bag of flour, I was cured of bread fever.

It's nice to make something yourself that you've always bought ready-made before. It stretches the brain to know the secrets behind a real baguette, a perfect espresso or an original pizza. But you still don't have to turn everything into your project, as the DIY store advertising would have you do.It has become a sickness of the self-sufficient city dwellers who are unable to provide for themselves to appropriate every product, every connoisseurship and to regard the label "homemade" as the highest seal of quality. But it's not, at least as long as you don't live far away from retail in the outback. I had to age ten different coffee brewing systems before I could admit to myself that the best espresso is at the little Illy café on the way to work. Since then, I've only made decent coffee at home, that's enough. In return, I no longer have to put up with a neurotic dual-circuit coffee maker or technical roasting talk and can watch a professional intuitively operate his machine a few times a week.

Technology makes us believe that we can do everything ourselves in top form: smoking and baking pizzas, cinema-sized films, milling like a carpenter, brewing beer in the bathtub and gardening on the balcony. As tempting as this may sound at times, we forget that we actually already have jobs. And we disregard the training, experience and craftsmanship of the people who have made these things their profession. A connoisseur is not someone who is dependent on their own production, but someone who knows where to get the best quality. So yes, do it yourself! But please be satisfied with amateur status.