Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make homemade bread.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers. It's 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 to enjoy by itself, or toasted with
butter. It's also great for making sandwiches with. Now the first thing
you're going to need is 1 and 1/4 cups of water.
I'm also going to be using 1/4 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 2 and 1/4 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 5 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 the 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 gonna 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. We're 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 and add a little bit more flour.
Work this in. In a minute we will start kneading it.
Alright, 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 gonna 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.
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. So 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.
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 a 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 gonna 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 loafs of
bread do. I don't usually do that. You could also lightly brush it with egg
which makes a slightly thicker crust. You could 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
pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
So once your dough has risen we're gonna 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.
Now 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 gonna let it cool a little bit and then we can go ahead and slice
away. :et's cut off the crust. Nobody likes the crust of bread. I mean if it's
homemade bread maybe we could 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, just even plain or using for sandwiches. So 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.
Mmm all we need is some butter