White bread

White bread

Making homemade bread by hand is fun, and it is easy to make the house smell like a home, and end up with warm bread that tastes delicious and looks cozy and homemade. Mix the ingredients, let it rise, shape the loaf and let it rise again, then bake and cool it. Easy! It isn’t rocket science, and human beings have been doing this for millennia.
What does take practice is figuring out to get exactly what you want in terms of shape, texture, flavor, crust, and etc. And figuring out what kinds of goodies you like to add – whole wheat flour, nuts, berries, herbs, cheese, etc. There is a lifetime of refinements and enhancements to learn if you want to.
…but don’t let that scare you! Remember that making a simple, tasty loaf of bread is easy, and *that* doesn’t take a lifetime to master.

Mixing

Get a cup of warm water, and put about a teaspoon or a teaspoon and a half of yeast in it. Stir till it dissolves. You don’t need to add any sugar to make this work great.
 
Using a large mixing bowl, mix together three cups of flour, and one teaspoon of salt. 
 
Add the water, and stir it. There won’t be enough water yet, so it’ll be really shaggy looking with a lot of dry flour still. That’s okay.
 
Add another quarter cup of water, then spend a minute trying to knead all the flour into the dough by hand. If it needs more water, add another quarter cup and knead some more. Knead it by folding it in half, than smushing it until it spreads out far enough so that you can fold it in half again. If there are piles of dry flour in the mixing bowl, push the dough into the pile so some of it sticks, and fold that dry patch into the dough.
At this point, it is fine if it does not have a smooth surface, if not all of the flour is incorporated, etc. It’s not too picky, just get the bulk of the flour in.

Rising

Cover with a lid or damp towel over the mixing bowl and let sit for an hour or two, whatever is most convenient for you. It should be pretty poofy by this point. Recipes often say things like “it should double in size”, and then you have to figure out if that means doubled in height, or width, or volume, or what. It doesn’t really matter. Just so long as it got bigger, and is poofy-ish. It’ll look pretty ragged at this point, ant that is okay.
Once it is nice and poofy, start the oven preheating for 500 F. Knead the dough like earlier, folding it in half. Do this 2-5 times, and the poofiness and raggedyness will mostly disappear and it’ll be about the size that you started with before it did any rising, but nice and smooth now. The exact size isn’t important, we’re just trying to reduce the number of large air pockets. When the bread is baked, if there are too many large air pockets under the top crust, then knead it a little more at this step the next time.

Shaping the loaf

The next step is to shape the dough into a loaf, either for baking in a pan or on a flat sheet. This is hard to explain in writing, so here are a few videos on youtube:
Make sure the loaf has some flour on it, and that’ll help it not stick. Just roll it around on a floured surface, and rub it a little with your hands if you want. If you are using a bread pan, butter it and put in the loaf. If you are using a baking sheet, put the loaf on it. Cover with a damp towel or an upside down mixing bowl, just something so it doesn’t get a dry crust.

Second rising

This next rise is a bit pickier, but it’s not too hard. Just keep an eye on it. After about thirty minutes, gently poke the loaf with a finger. There should be an indentation remaining on the loaf where you poked (here’s another video illustrating that from Father Dominic).
If there is an indentation, it is ready to bake. If not, let it rise for another 1o minutes and check again. If the whole thing deflates like an old air mattress, it rose for too long. Take it out, shape it again, put it back in the pan, then check it in 10 or 15 minutes and often after that until it is ready to go.

Scoring

The air pockets in the bread will expand with the heat, causing it to blow up like a balloon. The surface of the loaf will tear along some random line to accommodate this expansion, which can cause weird shapes and uneven cooking. That is why homemade and “fancy” breads often have the pretty patterns on them: those were cuts that the baker made on the risen loaf to allow it to expand without tearing.
The simplest way to do this is to make a couple slices lengthwise along the bread, but at a slight angle. Here’s a video showing it. Just simple scoring looks beautiful and homey. You need a sharp knife to do this. If none of your knives are particularly sharp, try using a serrated knife. Aim to cut about a half an inch deep, and try to cut confidently so you can do it in one stroke. Don’t worry if a half inch seems deep, it’ll expand and you won’t actually have gullies in your bread.
The principle is simply to make some cuts on the top of the loaf so it expands outwards. Following that principle, you can let your imagination run wild. Here are some incredibly beautiful patterns to give you some inspiration.

Baking

Put it in the oven at 500F for 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 400F for another ten minutes. There are a few different ways to know if a loaf is ready. I’ve heard that when you rap it with a knuckle, it should sound hollow. I haven’t gotten the knack of that yet, so I use a quick-read thermometer. When inserted into the middle of the loaf, it should read between 180F and 200F.

 

The cooler it is, the moister it’ll be, which is good up to a point. Too cold and it’ll be doughy. The hotter it is, the drier it will be. Too hot and it will be unpleasantly dry. There’s quite a range, though, where you’ll simply need to discover what you and your family prefer.

 

Oh, and be careful. It’s hot. ; )

 

If you like a hard crust, let it cool on a wood cutting board or on a cooling rack. If you like a softer crust, cover it with a moist towel.

Other tricks

Softer crust

When you put the bread in the oven, use a water spray bottle to spray the bread, and the sides of the oven. This will make steam and keep the humidity up, which will help keep the crust soft. You can spray again at the ten minute mark when you turn the temperature down. Careful, though, I’ve heard that this can damage some ovens. If that might be a concern, you can just spray the loaf itself before you put it in the oven, or put a casserole dish with water into the oven along with the loaf.

Using whole wheat flour

If desired, you can substitute 1 or 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour without changing the texture of the bread too much. Past that, it starts to be a different kind of bread that I haven’t quite figured out yet. You can search the web for whole wheat bread recipes if you want to go 100% whole wheat.

Using oatmeal, mashed potatoes, rice, pumpkin, squash, etc…

If you make any kind of starchy food, you can add that to your bread dough. Take out a half a cup of flour, and add a cup of one of those foods. Or take out one cup of flour, and add two cups of one of those foods. Then when adding water, remember that there was already some water in the food you added, so you won’t have to add as much extra water as you normally do.

 

If you make oatmeal with raisins in it, make a little extra and then you can have a tasty oatmeal raising bread. Same with mashed potatoes. If you use pumpkin puree, you can have a pumpkin bread that is actually bread, not a dessert cake. Have fun with it!

Extra goodies

You can throw in a couple teaspoons of italian herbs, a cup of grated cheese, nuts, cinnamon, raisons, cranberries, or other goodies here if you ever feel like experimenting. I like sprinkling a bit of salt on top of the loaves right before baking them, and you can also sprinkle herbs or spices on top for good effect.

Doubling the recipe

You can make two loaves at once, and freeze the extra. It doesn’t take much more time, and you the frozen loaf will be nice and fresh when it is thawed. The only difference is that after the raise, you will have to split the dough in two pieces and shape two loaves. The easiest way to do this is to knead the dough into a ball or other regular shape so you can easily see where half of it is, and use a sharp knife (serrated works well) to cut it cleanly in half. Then continue.

Making tons of loaves

You can also multiply the recipe by more than 2. Once you start making more than 3 or 4 loaves at once, you may find that you don’t have a big enough mixing bowl. You can use a 3 gallon food-safe plastic bucket, or one of those $5 plastic dishpans from the grocery store. It quickly gets difficult to stir with any regular kitchen implement, so be ready to do some kneading by hand.

 

It’s easiest do do this in multiples of two, because the math is easier, and also because it is easier to eyeball how to divide the dough into an even number of pieces.

 

When making a lot of loaves, it can save quite a bit of time if you learn how to shape them for baking on a sheet instead of in bread pans. You won’t need to butter them all, and you won’t need to clean them all.

 

Space the loaves out evenly on a baking sheet for the second rise. If they are touching at this point it isn’t the end of the world, but remember that they will expand quite a bit during the rise, and again during baking. If they are piled too closely, they’ll get very tall and could burn on the outside while still being dough on the inside.

 

If they do touch some during baking, that’s fine. When they’re done baking they will pull apart like buns. If that happens, while they cool put them back together so the steam doesn’t leak out from the places where they were joined and dry out the loaves.