Bread machines remove all the work, but don't imagine a machine is a must-have for stress-free baking. If you stick to these guidelines, you will soon be turning out all manner of delicious loaves.
Go cheap on white flour and expensive on the rest. Most white wheat flour is roller-milled and excellent, so it doesn't matter whether you buy it at Lidl or a posh deli. Wholewheat flours (think rye, spelt and barley) vary in quality, as roller-milling used for cheap brands strips out the flavoursome bits such as bran and oily wheatgerm. A small traditional miller can retain the whole grain.
If you're using a bread machine, use the recipes that come with it. Traditional recipes might not work with your machine so you'll save yourself trouble by varying (adding seeds, for example) the manufacturer's recipes if you want a different loaf.
Dan Lepard's Sour Cream Sandwich Bread Recipe
If you're making bread by hand, there are three steps essential to success with any recipe from any book or baker: mix the dough well and leave it for 10 minutes before kneading. After kneading leave the dough until it has risen by a half. Then, after shaping, bake the loaf when it has risen by a half to two-thirds, not double. Forget about the times given, just follow these visual guides and you'll be fine.
When adding grains that soak up water, like oats or cornmeal, soak them in an equal weight of boiling water and leave for 10 minutes first. Bake seeds lightly first, until golden, for a rich nutty taste. And when adding beer or wine, for extra flavour and colour, replacing more than half the water with alcohol will make the yeast sluggish.
A tray of boiling water, placed on the oven's bottom shelf just before baking, helps the top of the dough to open dramatically and gives the crust a rich colour. And adding a tablespoon of vinegar to the dough mix will help the crumb stay soft after baking, as will a tablespoon of soya flour. Half a small vitamin C tablet, or the juice of an orange, will help loaves rise better, especially if they contain a portion of wholemeal flour. And if your loaf smells of yeast, reduce the amount you use by a quarter next time. Replacing half the water in a recipe with yoghurt will give more flavour to white bread without it tasting milky.
Our 10 Best Bread Recipes
Kneading, very simply, means pressing the heel of your hand into the dough to stretch it, then folding the dough back on itself, rotating it a quarter turn, and repeating. I rub my hands and the worktop with oil, and only knead for 10 seconds every 10 minutes for half an hour. If you don't knead the dough at all it will still turn out fine, but the crumb might be a bit gummy. If you whack the dough about vigorously you will get a slightly fluffier crumb and tired arms.
You can conjure an impressive loaf with little effort and barely any kneading. Toss in up to 200g of cubed cheddar, crispy bacon, or well-drained pitted olives and some chopped herbs and you will have one of those wow breads you see in magazines.
Put the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl, pour in the water (and add any optional extras) then stir into a sticky mass. Cover the bowl with a cloth and leave for 10 minutes. Lightly oil your worktop and hands. Knead the dough for 10 seconds and return it to the bowl. Repeat twice more at 10-minute intervals, then leave in the bowl for 45 minutes. Wipe the worktop, dust it with flour then pat the dough into a rough oblong. Roll it up tightly, pinch each end to keep it neat then place seam-side down on a floured tray. Cover with a cloth and leave for 45 minutes or until the dough has expanded by a half. Flour the top of the dough, cut a slash down the middle and bake at 220°C/fan 200°C/425°F/gas 7 for 35-40 minutes.Keen to bake for your family or housemates, but put off by previous attempts? Here are delicious options – including some that don’t require yeast, and one that doesn’t even need an oven
How To Bake Bread
I n times of great uncertainty, knowing how to make your own bread and thereby feed your family, is palpably reassuring. The very act of kneading dough is calming, like Play-Doh for adults. So, of course, newbie bakers are all over social media, obsessing about “bubbling mothers” (AKA sourdough starters).
Look a little closer, though, and they’re not very happy. “We are all baking bread and some of us are not so good at it, ” tweeted one journalist, dejectedly. That’s because sourdough is high-maintenance baking. People write memoirs about mastering the technique. By contrast, watching Noji Gaylard making South African steamed bread (see below) is like hugging a baby. Three minutes and 30 seconds of pure calm. Her recipe, alongside the others included in our 10 basic breads, is easy enough for even the most inexperienced baker.
But first a note about yeast. As Adrian Chiles has noted, it appears to have been stockpiled right off all the shelves. So, if you do have any, set aside a portion of whatever leavened dough you make to leaven the next (variously called old dough and
The Science And Magic Of Breadmaking
; you’ll find plenty of instructions for this online). And, if you don’t, you could try making your own yeast. Lisa Bedford, the self-styled Survival Mom, has written a really thorough how-to. I appreciate that making your own yeast somewhat negates the premise of this piece, but you’ve got to admit it’s awesome that you can.
Also, reserve any pasta or potato cooking water for your bread baking. As Nigella tweeted: “It will help the bread’s texture and rise.”
At its simplest, a flatbread is flour and water mixed into a dough, rolled into balls, rested, flattened and griddled. Dan Lepard tweeted the basic ratio: 500g of any wheat flour (white, wholemeal, self-raising, plain) to 300g cold water. Add some form of oil to the mix, and you get everything from chapatis and rotis (Meera Sodha fills hers with coconut, raisins and almonds) to tortillas and lavash. Jamie Oliver switches things up a bit, using yoghurt, self-raising flour and a little baking powder, and cooks with griddle pan over a high heat. Elsewhere, his coconut flatbreads are made with just coconut milk and self-raising flour and fried in butter.
Gluten Free Bread Maker Basic Brown Bread
AKA batter bread, this is the base recipe used in such things as apple bread, banana bread and the French savoury cake
Studded with everything from bacon and olives. You mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt) with wet ingredients (milk/buttermilk/yoghurt, oil and eggs) and flavour it any way you like. Kristin “Baker Bettie” Hoffmann gives you every option thinkable: sweet, savoury, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan and without baking powder (she separates the eggs, and whips the whites to get the rise needed). Texture-wise, this is more on the muffin/cake side of things, so if that’s not what you’re after, read on.
The original no-kneader, and as Chiles put it last week, a gift to the yeastless. The rise comes from bicarb, so that ingredient is a must, but flour-wise it’s flexible: wholemeal, oatmeal, rolled oats, plain, self-raising, rye or whatever mixture you can manage. Liquid-wise, milk, yoghurt, buttermilk, Nigella’s pasta water: they’ll all work, too. You’ll want a dollop of salt and sweetness (honey, soft brown sugar); Chiles flavours his with treacle and Marmite, and nothing has ever endeared a columnist to me more. And there’s nothing to say you can’t jazz it up further: Oliver puts dark chocolate and hazelnuts in his.
Nigel Slater's Bread And Butter Recipes
The New York Times calls this the world’s easiest yeasted loaf; a step-up from the already groundbreaking easy method devised by Jim Lahey (if you’re a budding bread person, I recommend his books). You mix plain flour with yeast, salt and lukewarm water into a loose dough, cover and let rise for two to five hours. Then you shape it and bake it. The crustiness comes from having a broiling panful of water – or a few ice cubes – in the bottom of the oven to steam the loaf while it cooks.
Putting yeast in a wheaten flatbread essentially means it can puff up while baking, to create those soft pockets so perfect for picnics. Yotam Ottolenghi puts sugar in his dough and seven spices in his chicken filling, and, well, what more could you want? Although it is technically possible to make them completely lean, Felicity Cloake doesn’t recommend it: the fat contributes to flavour and shelf-life.
A Jamaican speciality, this is a plain-flour yeasted dough, enriched with butter and sugar. It takes a short knead (you want the dough nice and elastic) and a 45-minute rest. You then roll it out flat with a rolling pin and – to give it that moist, dense crumb – roll it right back up again into a tight log, tucking the ends in (DaJen Eat’s Jen and her grandmother Cynthia will show you how). Then, after a short
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