So guys, let me show you a really simple bread recipe
This is a really trusted way to do it, it's super simple and you can do it easily at home yourself, it's really good fun
And I'm going to be bigging up my beautiful bakeware range
And this is going to make 2 nice big tins
First up we've got 1 kilo of strong bread flour
Use your hand to make a well and then what we're going to do is add yeast to some tepid water
All sachets are 7 grams, so were going to add 1 sachet to 620ml of tepid water
So if you leave that for about 5 minutes, what you're going to do is activate this dormant dry yeast
And it will start to bubble
Absolutely start to bubble, so mix it up
What you can do is add just a little pinch of sugar to the tepid water
Now what this does it feed the yeast, get's it going, wakes it up
It also gives you a beautiful kind of, slightly darker crust
Let it just begin to froth up and then we'll make the bread
Add a nice generous couple of pinches of salt
To the flour well
We're going to wait for that yeast to activate and start kid of, bubbling
At that point we're going to add the water to the well
Now you can see I'm using my fork here and I'm just bringing the fork in from the outside to the inside, it makes like a kind of porridge first
What we want to make is a beautiful, smooth, elastic dough
This recipe of normally bang on but sometimes depending on the weather, you know the flour can react slightly differently
So be prepared to add a little bit more water or flour depending on how it looks
Literally use the fork until the last moment when you can't use it anymore
Then were going to go through a process of kneading, now I can kind of tell you there's a specific technique but really just move it
Stretch it, rip it. Really rub it and rub it onto the marble, it'll become less sticky
Of course if you've got little stuck bits of dough you can use a pallet knife just to scrape the dough off of it
Every time you knead it, you're kind of making the gluten stronger and stronger and therefore it's going to trap and stretch and hold in those gases
That the yeast, kind of create
OK guys so look, that's had about 10 minutes kneading now
This is going to have 2 proves, the 1st prove will be to develop flavour
OK, so I'm just going to put it in a bowl, rub with a little bit of oil
and you can do this over about 2 hours until it's doubled in size
Or you can even do it in the fridge so it's colder, and it'll prove slower, but what you'll get is even more flavour, it'll develop more flavour
So you choose which way you want to do it, I'm going to cover this with some cling film
So it's kept nice and humid
And if you look over here, here's a dough that's had 2 hours proving
So let's have a little look
I'm going to add a little bit of flour
To a surface here and pull out this dough
I'll split this dough in half here, smash the air out of it and then what we're going to do is just fill these 2 molds here
Knead it out into a ball, just put it straight it
Next thing I do is get myself a tea towel and I just put it under a warm tap and I want to ring it out so it's a nice humid environment
And then I'll simply pop this over the top and let it prove for about an hour/hour and a half until its doubled in size and then we'll bake it
So guys after an hour you can see it's doubled in size, I'm going to put it in the middle of the oven
The oven is preheated to 200 degrees Celsius which is 400 Fahrenheit
30 minutes in there, 35 minutes until it sort of sounds hollow when you tap it, and we'll be good to go
OK guys so after 35 minutes, I took the bread out of the tin, and I wanted to hear that hollow sound
And then you know it's fluffy and cooked on the inside, of course the top is really nice and crisp
Let's have a little look inside
Beautiful, look at that
A nice simple sandwhich or toast made with homemade bread, turns the everyday and the boring into something sublime and gorgeous
If you want to see more of my gorgeous bake ware range hit the I up there and check it out, it's beautiful
And if you want to see a lovely recipe for Irish Soda Bread made with Gennaro Contaldo, yeah he's Italian
And Donal Skehan, he's definitely Irish, then details are in the information box below
You're going to have a lovely time cooking that, it's a great recipe
So, until next time guys, bye!