Home Made Basic White Bread
With current COVID-19 situation, we try to limit our trips to the grocery store as much as possible. But bread is one of those things, you can’t store them for too long, and you have random cravings for them. So, I rolled up my sleeves and started making home made basic bread. These turned out super easy and frankly, taste way better than store bought breads.
Heads up, this recipe makes 2 loaves. You will need 2 9×5 in loaf pans (slightly smaller or bigger is not an issue). But literally one of the loaves will be consumed within 30 minutes after the breads are done baking, so you pretty much don’t need to cut the recipe in half.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of luke warm water (110-120F)
- 2/3 cups of white sugar
- 1 1/2 TBSP yeast
- 6 cups of all purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 butter melted
Method:
Dissolve sugar in warm water, sprinkle in yeast and mix well. Let the mixture stand for about 5 minutes or until the yeast foams up.
In your stand mixer bowl, add flour, mix in salt and pour in melted butter. Pour the yeast water into the flour. Use a dough hook and let the mixer go for about 5 to 10 minutes, or until the dough pulls away from the bowl. The dough will be quite tacky and sticky. Do not add in any additional flour, that will make your bread tough.
In the picture above, I reserved some flour from the 6 cups and used a standard paddle. But I made these breads so many times in the past several weeks, I realized there is no need to reserve any flour, or dirty the paddle. All flour go in at once and go straight to a dough hook works just fine.
Once the dough pulls away from the bowl, lightly dust a clean work surface and kneed the dough for a few minutes until a smooth ball forms. Grease the inside of a large bowl. Put dough ball into the bowl, move it around so the bottom of the dough ball is well greased. Then flip the dough ball over and cover the bowl with a plastic wrap or clean damp kitchen towl.
Keep the bowl at a warm and draft free place, such as near the stove or in the oven. I put the bowl into the oven, and turned on the oven light without turning on the oven. This slight heat from the light bulb actually helps speed up the rising process. About 30 minutes later, the dough is ready for next step.
Punch the dough down to release the trapped gas in the dough, take the dough out, and kneed for a few minutes on the clean work surface. Divide the dough into equal 2 parts. Kneed each half and shape them into loaves. You can achieve this by rolling out the dough like a pizza crust. Then fold two sides and roll the dough up into a log. Again, this step is what I figured out along the practice process. The following pictures were taken at the very first attempt of making these breads. So the logs were not very good looking.
Let the loaves rise again using the plastic wraps or damp towel and leave them in the lit oven for about 20 minutes. They shall poof up like baked breads.
Take the breads out of the oven, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and bake these breads for about 25 to 30 minutes until the top is golden brown and the bottom sounds hollow when you tap on them.
Here is another tip, once the breads are baked, take them out of the loaf pans immediately and let them cool on wire racks, do not let the loaf sit in the pans to cool, otherwise the bottom will get soggy and soft.
Slice them up and serve with PB&J, simple butter spread, cream cheese and honey, avocado… the choices are endless.
