1 DOUGH 3 LOAVES | The Easiest (Actually Good) Bread You Can Make

What's up? Today, I'm going to show you guys how to make a really easy rustic bread dough, and then we're going to look at three ways to turn that dough into something crusty and delicious for your table. You don't need any skills, you don't need a stand mixer, and you definitely don't need a sourdough starter. So if that sounds like fun, stick around. Let's get started. Like I said, this is not a sourdough bread recipe, and I've designed it for the beginner baker. So if you've never made bread before, this is going to be a really great place to start. One thing that I want to do though is strike that balance between complexity of flavor and simplicity of process. So we are going to start by building a pre-ferment, and all I mean by that is mixing some flour, water, and yeast together before we actually mix our dough to build some flavor and to give the final product a little bit more color and structure. The type of pre-ferment we're doing here today is called a poolish, and you might recognize that from my baguette video a few weeks ago. To make that poolish, you're going to mix together 150 grams of room temperature water, a small pinch of yeast, like an eighth teaspoon or 30 or 40 granules, and 150 grams of all-purpose flour. You're just going to stir that to combine, throw a lid on it, and let it sit on the counter from anywhere from four to 24 hours. A well-aged poolish gives us a darker, crispier crust and a longer lasting, more resilient bread overall. If you can get yourself to do a little bit of planning, I highly recommend letting this ripen overnight. You can get away with a four-hour pre-ferment here. I've done it a few times that way, and it works out totally fine, but more time equals more flavor. So to mix this dough, we're going to grab a medium stainless steel bowl, and into that we're going to measure 280 grams of warm water, two grams of yeast, all of the poolish that we mixed yesterday. Take a second to stir that to combine into the water a little bit. That's going to make the hand mixing part of this much easier in a second. To that slurry, we're going to add 350 grams of all-purpose flour, 50 grams of whole wheat flour, and 10 grams of salt. To do this mix, we're going to grab a sturdy spoon and stir everything to combine. We're trying to keep this dough from getting stuck to everything in sight, so combining it this way with the spoon is the tried and true cleanest way of making dough without a mixer. Once things are combined and we can't really move it around with a spoon anymore, we're going to make our hand very wet, and then we're going to get in there and finish it off. The move here is to squeeze, rotate, and repeat. This replicates the motion of a fancy bakery-style orbital mixer. All we're trying to do is just combine the ingredients. All of the strength building and gluten development are going to come a little bit later through the folding process. After about 60 to 90 seconds of squeeze, rotate, repeating with a wet hand, things are looking good. They're well combined, so I'm going to grab some plastic wrap. I'm going to wrap this up and set a 30-minute timer. All right, it's been 30 minutes since we mixed this dough. I'm going to take the plastic off here. No strength. It's a really slacky boy right now. I'm going to wet my hand, and we're going to come and do the sort of tuck and fold method you've seen me do a few times on this channel. So my hand's real wet. You don't want to mess around with a dry hand here because it will get all up in your arm hair. Anyway, so that's what it looks like. I'm going to reach in, kind of scoop from underneath, pull, and fold it back over itself. I'm going to do that like eight or ten times, pulling up, throwing back. Take it to the point where the tension is starting to sort of the dough is like really feels like it can't go any further. Fold it back, and you can see real quick that this dough will start to get a lot more strong. What we're doing is just layering the gluten network. Those things start to stack up on top of each other, get hooked up. So now I've got it folded. I'm going to do a little bit of a tuck maneuver here. This is kind of like a slap and fold. Kind of like a slap and fold. So you're going to scoop it from underneath, turn it 90, and then kind of tuck. We're just trying to get this dough into kind of like a taut round ball, basically. I'm just going to do it six or seven times. It's almost like if you were on the countertop shaping a bowl. That's what I'm doing right here. This is just another way for me to get a little bit extra in there. And then that's it. Like it went from a really gross looking shaggy mess into like a nice taut tucked ball. Oh, look at that. Okay. After 30 more minutes or 60 minutes total at this point, we're going to come back and repeat the folding like I mentioned before. These two quick rounds of folds are all we need to get a well-developed and strong dough that's easily going to hold itself up in the oven. Once things are folded up again, we're going to wrap this with plastic and I'm going to ferment it for one more hour. That's going to be two hours total of bulk fermentation. After that two hours, the dough should look bubbly and alive and really buoyant. It should smell sweet and yeasty. And at that point, we're going to shape the loaf. And I'm going to show you three different ways to do that. And it's going to be a little bit more complex each time. We're starting with the most easy, of course. It's going to be something that literally anybody could make. You don't need any special gear or previous experience. We're going to move on to something that's 15% more complex, but 50% better in terms of crust, flavor, and just overall outcome. And the third way is going to be a big dog, fully shaped bowl that's just going to blow anything you can get at the grocery store out of the water. So let's start with the easiest way you can get this dough into the oven. I'm going to flip the dough out of the bowl onto a lightly floured work surface, and then I'm going to lightly flour the top. I'm going to grab a half sheet tray and line that with a piece of parchment, and then I'm going to liberally flour that as well. Using a dough scraper or a well-floured knife, we're going to cut this dough mass into two pieces. The only shaping we're doing here is a gentle tuck under and sort of prop up thing just to get a perky, well-structured mound of dough that's going to sit up on itself when you move it to the sheet tray. If things are going well, you should have two strong, well-risen chunks of this dough that are relatively rectangular. For the absolutely fastest and most simple path to making bread, just preheat your oven to 525 degrees and spray these loaves with a little bit of water. Once the oven is up to temp, I'm going to throw the sheet tray in there and bake it for 20 to 25 minutes or until things are really well browned and starting to get crusty. Be careful because the bottom of the sheet tray can get pretty hot. It is metal, so just try to keep away from the heating elements if they're on the bottom of your oven. So that's method one of three. Tons of flavor from the poolish and plenty of good bread utility. You could wipe it through something saucy or turn it into a crostini, but we can definitely do better. So to get to method two, we're going to move on to something slightly more complex here. We're going to be baking these in a Dutch oven with a lid. So starting at the point where we have the two pieces of dough set up on the floured sheet tray, I'm going to cover that with another sheet tray and let it proof on the counter for 30 to 40 minutes. At that point, I'm going to load a Dutch oven into a 525 degree oven and let it preheat. After that oven is well preheated and my Dutch oven is ripping hot, I'm going to grab that sheet tray of proofy dough, and I'm going to cut the parchment in half. I'm going to give these loaves a quick slash with my bread lame, and this is more of a gesture than anything else. I like to have a tear on the top of a rustic bread like this. It's purely aesthetic. Once we've got that cut, we're going to carefully lift the parchment paper and the loaf and place it into the Dutch oven. We're going to cover this and bake it in the oven at 500 degrees for 12 minutes. At that point, we're going to remove the lid of the Dutch oven and turn things to 485 degrees so we can continue baking for an additional 12 to 15 minutes. We're looking to get a very crusty, very dark, almost reddish loaf. With the second method here in the Dutch oven, we get a much more interesting crust and a more well-risen loaf. The Dutchie traps the steam the loaf gives off naturally when it bakes, and it gives us a much glossier, more brittle, and longer lasting crust. I'm going to let this loaf rest and then load the second piece of dough, repeating the we did for loaf one. I love this loaf of bread. It's very creamy, toasty, yeasty. It checks all of the boxes. If we put this loaf next to the first one, we can see a real uptick in terms of quality. The crust is much more set, it's darker, it's more brittle, and you can bet that it has a lot more flavor. Okay, if you're ready, the third variation here is a big dog fully shaped and proofed boule. And as a reminder, all these loaves have the same dough as a starting point. We're just changing up how we shape them and how we bake them. So to shape this boule, we're going to flip the whole dough out onto a well-floured work surface. I'm going to hit my proofing basket with some flour, and don't worry if you don't have one of these, we're going to get to that in a second. We're going to shape this entire thing. We're not going to be cutting this in half. So to do that, we're going to grab a side of it, pull it out, and fold it back. We're going to repeat that motion and work our way around the dough. Once things are stretched and tucked up into a ball, grab opposing sides and do a crisscross tuck, repeating that three or four times. At this point, we're going to flip the loaf over and round things off. Using your hands at 10 and 2, we're going to create tension and rotate the loaf, keeping the seam we just created in the center and on the bottom. This is just a larger scale version of what we do with burger buns, and check a full slow-mo demo of that in the chicken salad video. We're going to flip this shaped loaf seam side up into a 9-inch proofing basket. Wait a second. So Lauren convinced me, and now I agree, that most of you guys aren't going to have a 9-inch proofing basket. So in the spirit of a truly beginner's recipe, I just washed out the stainless steel bowl that we proofed the dough in. So we're going to transfer that over to that, and to do that, grab a tea towel, fold it twice, and line the stainless steel bowl. At that point, we're going to flour everything liberally because tea towels are not really designed to have dough in there, but it will work as long as we've got plenty of flour to keep the dough separate from the cloth. We're going to proof this on the counter for 30 to 50 minutes. After about 45 minutes, the loaf is buoyant, it's full of gas, and has risen dramatically. When it comes to proofing, an exact time is always really hard to say. So just try and replicate how this loaf looks and the overall size to what I have here. To bake this, we're going to flip this whole thing into our hand and carefully lower it into the Dutch oven. If you're not down with this move because your Dutch oven's real hot and you're not a bad dog, you can flip this whole loaf onto a piece of parchment paper and just lower it into the oven like we did in method two. A full rustic boule in this style needs to be scored on top so that it can open and rise to its full potential in the oven. So for that, I prefer scissors and that's because it's rustic looking, it's really pretty, and it doesn't require any skill. I'm going to turn the temperature down at this point to 485. We're going to bake this big dog for 18 minutes covered and an additional 25 to 35 minutes uncovered. This is going to depend on how good your oven is, but we want to bake it dark, like really dark. The majority of the fun flavor here is going to come from that deep, toasty, malty crust, so don't be scared. After about 40 minutes total, our loaf is looking really dope. It's brittle and crisp and rustic and it's just everything that a fun loaf of bread should be. And oh yeah, it sings when it comes out of the oven, listen. So we got the three breads, we got the easiest one here, which isn't bad, but the crust is pretty dead. But I mean it's still good bread, we can, I'll cut into it real quick. Like not even that stupid of crumb. It's nice bread, like if anybody gave this to you in a restaurant, you'd be stoked on it. It's got good flavor, yeasty, and this crust can come right back if you throw it in the oven like I mentioned before. So total winner for almost no work right here. This is the one that was baked in the Dutch oven. Again, like fine crumb, but that's not really what we're after. We want something that has life and has a lot of flavor and is crispy and has a much more interesting crust than the unsteamed, just like straight up baked in the oven one. And if you were to pop this back in the oven, it'd be super brittle, really fun. This is a big chunk of bread. Oh my, this is essentially just a giant baguette. It's one, it's a one kilo baguette, tailor-made for dipping, dippage. Oh baby. Robust crust. I want to say one more thing before I go and that's everybody deserves this. A simple, easy, rustic bread is just a core tenant of a good life. And if you enjoyed this video, give it a like, maybe hit subscribe, tell a friend. As always guys, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you for being here till the end and we'll see you next time. I was looking at the camera while taking that bite and got really close to biting my own finger. Like it slid off the tooth. Beware. Stay frosty. See you next time.