How to Make Homemade Bread

Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make homemade bread. Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Sam here and today I am sharing a simple, basic, but completely delicious recipe for homemade bread. This bread is great for enjoying as a side with your dinner, it's great for enjoying by itself, or toasted with butter. It's also great for making sandwiches with. Now the first thing you're going to need is one and a fourth cups of water. I'm also going to be using one fourth cup of whole milk for this recipe. If you don't have any milk at home you can make this recipe with just water, but I love using a little bit of milk. It helps make the bread a little more flavorful, a little more soft. I'm going to combine the milk and water. And as with most bread recipes, mine is going to be using yeast. And in order to make that yeast rise we're going to need to activate it with a warm liquid. So I'm going to pop this one and a half cups of liquid in my microwave and heat it until it's between 105 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit. It is important that you check the temperature of your liquid because if it's too cold your yeast won't activate, and if it's too hot it'll actually kill your yeast. Now because the microwave doesn't always heat everything evenly, you'll want to stir your liquid before measuring the temperature. So this is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, so that's right in our 105 to 115 degree range. So I'm going to add this to a large bowl. Now you're going to need two and a fourth teaspoons of active dry yeast, and that's usually how much is in a single packet. So I'm just going to sprinkle this over the milk mixture. And I'm also going to add just a little bit of granulated sugar, about a teaspoon in with that yeast. This is going to help the yeast grow. And then you'll want to give everything a stir. You can use a spoon, a spatula, or a whisk. You just want to make sure that yeast is nicely combined with the water. So let this sit for about five minutes until the yeast is foamy. If your yeast does not get foamy, that means it hasn't activated. You're going to have to throw this out and start over. Your yeast might actually be dead. Once your yeast is activated, let's grab our flour. Now you're going to need about four and a half cups of flour total for this recipe. I highly recommend you use bread flour if you have it, but if you don't happen to have it in your house, you can use all-purpose flour. Using all-purpose flour yields a bread that is a little less sturdy, it's a little less chewy, but it's still going to work. Now I mentioned you need four and a half cups total, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. But for now we're just going to add about two cups in with our yeast. And I'm just eyeballing it, just adding about half of the flour. We are also going to be adding two tablespoons of granulated sugar, two tablespoons of unsalted butter, and ideally this should be pretty soft, about room temperature, and I've cut mine into pieces just to help make it easier to incorporate, and two teaspoons of salt. We'll just stir everything together until it's completely combined. Your butter pieces aren't going to completely incorporate into the batter just yet, but they'll get there. You can make this bread either by hand like I'm doing today, or you can do it using a stand mixer. A stand mixer is actually going to be a little easier, it's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but I just wanted to show you how it can be made by hand also. So once you have your ingredients pretty well combined, now we're going to continue to gradually add more flour until the dough begins to cling together. So I can see my dough has a long way to go still before it gets too dry, so I'm going to add about another cup of flour in here, and I am using my spatula as I go to kind of flatten that butter to help incorporate it into the rest of my dough. Now if you were using your stand mixer for this, you would want to use your dough hook attachment. I'm going to add a little bit more flour here, and what we're looking for is we want the dough to be completely combined. We want it to be forming a ball. If you're using your stand mixer, it should be clinging to itself and pulling away from the sides of the bowl. Kind of looking for the same thing here when we're doing it by hand. It's a little bit more of an arm workout mixing everything together by hand rather than using your stand mixer. So if you're using an electric mixer and a dough hook, you want to keep adding flour until the consistency of the dough is smooth and elastic, it's forming a ball, it's pulling away from the sides of the bowl, and if you touch it, it might be a little bit tacky, but it shouldn't be super sticky. The dough shouldn't be sticking to your fingers. Now if you are making this dough by hand like I am, it's probably going to take a little bit more time to get it nice and smooth and elastic, and we're actually going to end up finishing it off by kneading it, which we'll get to in just a second. This dough is just still a little bit sticky. I'm going to add a little bit more flour and work this in. In a minute we will start kneading it. All right, at this point our dough is pretty stiff. It's pretty dry. I have most of the flour incorporated, but I'm struggling to get the last bit incorporated. So now I'm going to transfer it to a clean, lightly floured surface, and I'm going to start kneading it. Now when you start kneading this dough, if you've been mixing everything by hand, it's probably going to seem a little bit sticky still, so we are going to continue to add more flour to the dough as needed until it's no longer sticky. We are going to knead this dough until it is smooth and elastic, and it forms a nice round ball. This could take several minutes. It could take as long as 10 minutes. This is still a little bit sticky, so I'm going to sprinkle a little bit more flour on and work that in. So if the dough is sticking to your hands, just keep adding more flour. Of course, you don't want to overdo it either. There's a nice balance. You want your dough to be still a little bit tacky, but you don't want it to be too dry. So I've probably added about four and a quarter cups of flour to get the bread to the right consistency. You may need a little bit less. You may need a little bit more. Whenever you're making a yeast bread, the amount of flour you need always tends to vary a little bit, and you really want to go based off the texture of your dough rather than based off of whatever amount the recipe says. And we're just turning our dough, kneading it with our palms, just trying to work it into the proper consistency. And kneading the dough is also helping to develop the gluten in the dough, which is going to give our bread the proper texture. Even if I use my stand mixer to make the dough, I usually find that I still have to finish it off by kneading it by hand. I can do most of the kneading for about five minutes with the dough hook, and then I'll usually transfer it to a lightly floured surface and knead it by hand for about two minutes, just to finish it off and get the right consistency. So it's taken me about 10 minutes of kneading, and I finally have this dough at a consistency that I'm happy with. It's smooth and elastic. It's formed a nice round ball. So we are going to let this rise. Now your dough is going to need to sit and rise until it's doubled in size. So you want to make sure you grab a clean bowl that's large enough to give it room to double. Now I like to just lightly oil. I recommend lightly oiling your bowl. I'm just using a little bit of olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil. Those would work just as well. I'm just going to run this along the inside of the bowl. So the whole inside of the bowl is coated with oil. Now we'll take our dough, place it in our bowl, and we're going to turn it because you want the whole surface of your dough to be coated lightly with that oil. And then we're just going to cover this with plastic wrap, and you'll want to let it sit in a warm draft-free place until it's doubled in size. Typically for me this takes about an hour. It could take as long as two hours. So it's been a little bit over an hour, probably about an hour and 15 minutes, and my dough has doubled in size. So at this point I'm going to transfer it to a clean surface. I'm going to lightly dust that with some flour first. Turn our dough out onto this surface. I like to lightly dust my hands with flour, and then use my hands to deflate the dough. You want to work out any air pockets that might be in here. You can use a rolling pin to do this. I usually just use my hands. So once you've deflated your dough, now you're going to want to form this into about an 8 inch by 12 to 13 inch rectangle. Again, you can use a rolling pin. You want the dough to be nice and even. I am just using my hands today. Saves me a dish later on. I'm going to roll this up into a log in just a second, but first I want to prepare my bread pan. You'll need a 9 by 5 inch bread pan for this recipe, and my recipe does only make one loaf of bread. You can double it if you want though, and I'm just going to lightly grease this. Now I'm just using shortening to grease the pan. I'm just going to grease the bottoms and the sides lightly. Now we'll roll up our bread, and we're going to start with one of our 8 inch sides, and roll it up really tightly into a log. Once you get to the end, you're going to take this seam at the bottom, and you want to pinch it. Seal this loaf of bread, because that's what we have now. This is a loaf of bread. Let's grab our bread pan, brush off any excess flour, and you're going to tuck each end down, so you don't have a spiraled edge here. Tuck it in, under, and then we'll transfer this to our bread pan. So this bread is going to need to rise again before we can actually bake it. Now there are a couple of things you can do at this point if you want. You can take a serrated knife and slash lengthwise down the middle of the bread. That way you have that kind of typical indent at the top that most loaves of bread do. I don't usually do that. You could also lightly brush it with egg, which makes a slightly thicker crust. You brush it with milk to help it brown a little bit more. I don't do any of that. I'm just going to cover it with a towel, and I'm just going to let this sit for about 40 minutes, until it's risen to be about an inch above the edge of the bread pan. So it should be roughly doubled in size. Now while your bread is rising, it's a good idea to go ahead and preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. So once your dough has risen, we're going to take this baby over to our 400 degree Fahrenheit preheated oven. It's going to need to bake for about 25 minutes, or until it's a nice golden brown on top, and if you tap it, it should sound hollow. That's how you know it's done. As soon as it finishes baking, we're going to invert this onto a cooling rack to cool. So obviously the bread is going to be super hot when it first comes out of the oven, so we're going to let it cool a little bit, and then we can go ahead and slice away. Let's cut off the crust. Nobody likes the crust of bread. I mean, if it's homemade bread, maybe you can eat it, but that's not what we're looking for today. My husband has informed me that what I meant to say was the heel of the bread, not the crust of the bread, because the crust of the bread is everywhere. And that is how you make homemade sandwich bread. Great for serving as it is with butter, plus eating plain, or using for sandwiches. If you guys try this one out, I would love to know what you think. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Oh, we needed some butter.