How to make a loaf of bread from scratch (Beginner friendly!)

everyone needs to know how to make a great basic loaf of bread today i'm going to show you my simple one loaf white sandwich bread that you can pull off in your own kitchen very easily this was originally a video i formatted for a facebook live so it's a little bit different than what i normally show here on the channel but it has all the steps and i feel like if i can give you all the steps in real time you'll be more successful when you try it on your own so check it out and let me know what you think and i'll see you guys in a little bit [Music] we're going to start out by activating our yeast and i know this is the part that scares everybody to death but i promise it's not that bad in this cup i have one cup of lukewarm water now temperature wise if it's warm enough to put a baby in it's completely safe for your yeast so please don't stress over this just a cup of warm water then i've got my yeast here now this is active dry that's the kind there's two kinds active dry has to be activated in water and then instant yeast or fast rising yeast just gets dumped into your flour so if you have the other kind you can let me know as you're watching the video but we have active dry here that's just what i always use let's give it a shake to get it down out of the way so it's not getting oh and also let me tell you this check the back for the expiration date and make sure that it's still in inside its expiration date if it's outside its expiration date please don't use it because yeast is a living thing and if it's expired it's very likely not going to rise okay so yeast goes in the water just like that and then just take a fork and just give it a gentle stir sometimes i don't even really stir it but it'll just kind of clump up on the bottom and do a couple things there for a few minutes and don't worry about it okay so this is going to sit just like this until it starts to foam and i'm going to leave this here so that i can show you what that looks like and then in a second i'll show you how we'll know it's ready to use so i'll be back in just a second so now do you see these little things popping up right here it's been about four four and a half minutes if your house is cool this is going to take us a little bit longer to do so be patient with it but you see these see this stuff kind of coming up right here it's thicker and doesn't look like the rest of the cloudy water over here that means your yeast is alive and if you sit here and watch it you'll see it kind of go blue it'll bubble up from the bottom and you'll get more and more and more of that so as soon as you see that happening go ahead and start on your recipe so what i'm going to do is i'm going to set this aside and i really wanted you all to be able to see so make sure and get my bowl all centered up so everything is right okay so i'm going to show you what i put in next this is prop really probably no proper technique but we're going to do it anyway so in goes our yeast mixture make sure you get it all out because there will be some kind of lingering in the bottom just get that in and then now we're going to use an egg here ideally your eggs should be warm the warmer your ingredients are the more quickly your yeast is going to rise your bread is going to rise so ideally your egg should be warm i'm gonna put him in sorry for all the focusing issues my camera doesn't like me moving around under it so much so our egg goes in and then we're gonna do a couple of tablespoons of sugar now you can leave this out if you want to but it's it's pretty necessary if you ask me i think you can tell if you leave anything out of this recipe now and you all know me so i'm using organic cane sugar here this is one of those times that you just can't get away with coconut sugar or any of those alternatives you can use honey if you want to that's okay that's fine so if you do honey you're gonna do just a tablespoon or so don't do don't do three tablespoons because honey is much much sweeter okay after the honey we're after the sugar let's do a couple tablespoons of oil and then i'm using avocado because it's flavorless and it's what i like but you use whatever you've got on hand not not olive oil that's probably not one you're going to want to use because it has too much flavor and then the other thing i want to put in is some salt and i'm going to do three quarters of a teaspoon of course i'm using a pink himalayan sea salt here you must must must put the salt in here so if you're using table salt three quarters of a teaspoon is fine okay so we've got our liquid our liquid ingredients in now we're going to do our flour so really quick i'm going to slide this back now you may not have a bread flour on hand i love king arthur but it just really makes your bread a lot lighter if you use a bread flour but all-purpose will work here don't not make it just because you don't have bread flour but that's what i keep okay so in our cup here i'm going to show you real quickly really quickly how to measure flour you can't scoop it in the bag so what you do is you take a spoon and you scoop the flour you make a mess but you scoop the flour out i'm trying to keep it so you can see you scoop the flour into the cup if you don't know how to do this it's always good to learn basics like this because if you scooped it from the bag you'd pack it and in america like what i would really tell you to use is a digital scale but in the united states people are like no we don't use digital skills that's terrible well that's the only way to really accu accurately measure flower so you level it off and i'm just going to kind of do this scantily so i don't make a mess on everything but if there were extra on the top you just scrape it off and that's one cup okay so we're gonna do three and a half cups now i'm going to start with just three because based on your weather if it's very humid your flower will hold more moisture and you don't really know if you need all that flour just yet so i have the extra half cup hiding out if i need it but for now let's just stir this together with a fork let's see what it looks like bread is really something that takes practice and patience i think i made my first loaf with my mom when i was about nine and i'm 40 gonna be 41 in a couple of months and so i had a lot of time to practice your bread probably won't look like mine mine doesn't look like my my husband's you know family or his grandmother was making bread up into her 90s and my bread was never like hers so just be patient with yourself and and just keep trying now this is pretty wet still i feel like i need that other half cup of flour so let me get some i'm going to put in just a few tablespoons of it and eventually it's going to get kind of thick so i'm going to probably have to use my fingers don't be afraid to put your hands in there see how it's kind of wanting to ball up in there that's a good sign that it's about right you don't want it sticking to the bowl and so i'm going to take scrape it off there and just kind of give it a little work with my hands here in the bowl it's still decently sticky but that's all right this is kind of how i want it about like that okay so this is step one now all i'm going to do is just put a light coating of i have some spray avocado oil here but you can do it with just regular oil tap it on your fingers just whatever you want just tap it on the top that's going to keep your bread from forming a skin while it's rising and i'm going to leave this i'm going to put a piece of plastic wrap over the top or you can use a dish towel and let this sit for an hour give or take until it's doubled in size so we should expect to see it up around the rim of this bowl here now if your house is cold my house is like 68 degrees probably somewhere between 68 and 70. this may take a little bit longer than an hour watch your food and don't watch the recipe so much that's where a lot of cooks make the mistake they think oh it's been an hour i gotta you know gotta do something with this right now so just just watch the rest just watch the dough and so in about an hour it should be significantly larger and then we'll move on to kneading and get it in the loaf pan which is very easy so be back in just a little bit look what we have got here it is doubled it looks beautiful you can see that see almost all the way up to the edge of the rim easy to tell that it's nice nicely risen it's springy and it's time to go ahead and get it ready for the loaf pan for our second rise so what we're going to do we're going to put some flour down on our surface and this is i think where people sometimes want to go a little south on things is because they want to see how that's stringing out like that that's a sign that our gluten is nicely developed in our dough um they want to add too much flour during this step so i want you to try to resist that temptation to put too much on this and you know you're really not going to be able to hurt it i promise but so we're going to do is we're going to need this now i have i have a little bit of flour on our surface here and i'm just going to start i've got to make myself a little pile of flour let me see where i can put it where you can see it kind of over here so go a little extra in case i need it for anything but there's the technique for this is really not hurt you don't have to be perfect but i'm just folding it over push it forward with my hands fold it and push it okay you do not have to do this perfectly you you're not gonna ruin it by doing it any other way so we're gonna we're gonna work this oops i hit the camera with my head okay let me move it over now we're just going to connect i'm folding i'm putting the heels of my hands in so what we're doing i'm folding it over itself kind of in half putting my heels in my hands in it and i'm pushing it forward okay and i'm going to bring it back turning it a little bit same thing fold it over heels of the hands push it away now we're going to do that until this dough is very elastic and wants to spring back so i can already feel this just after a few turns and it's kind of getting a little firm like almost stiff and that's what you're building up so if you're using all-purpose flour you may take a little longer to do this than with a bread flour because the bread flour has a higher gluten content than an all-purpose flour does but i want to show you how long it takes to do this now some people see how it's not sticky it's nice and smooth now some people who are really fancy this will pull theirs and look to see if it will hold what they call a window pane test mine's not there yet so we can go a little more if we want to and the window pane test is when you can kind of stretch the dough and you can see light through it without it breaking so that's how you know that you've got your gluten kind of thoroughly built up a lot of people don't need their bread long enough and you're really not going to hurt it as long as you do it by hand if you get the idea that you're going to use see just a little flour not very much it's starting to get a little sticky if you get the idea that you're going to use your hand mixer or your stand mixer i mean like a kitchenaid it is possible to overwork dough if you do that but by hand it's a whole lot harder to do so we're just going to keep pushing this out i'm just kind of letting it drag across the board as i push with my hands not hard and i'm not going to speed this up because i want you all to see how long it actually takes so see it's starting to get a little sticky there so we just add a little flour that might have been a couple of tablespoons total that i have in that little pile on the corner so i'm just dragging it in if i feel sticky i just kind of pat on it pat a little in don't dump cups and cups of flour on this okay let's see where we are that's a pretty ball of dough right there so if i pull this up and stretch it i can see light just a little bit see that just right in right in there you can get a little bit of light before it starts to break that's pretty close and we could give it another six or eight turns maybe but you know don't be surprised if it takes you you know five minutes of kneading total that wouldn't surprise me a bit if you're using all purpose it may take you closer to seven or eight minutes to get it up where you need it to go but what this does is it builds up the gluten structure when you build up the gluten structure you get a lighter um what do i say more defined i guess crumb to the bread it's not nearly as heavy so so you want to do that okay so i'm just dragging in flour from wherever that makes me happy now let me show you how to get it in your loaf pan so i have a 9 by 5 by three inch loaf pan and this one is by usa pan and they are my favorite in the whole wide world you don't have to grease this because these literally don't stick everything falls out of them but i'll just give it a light coating if you're using your grandma's old loaf pan it's like black and man you're gonna have to coat this thing down in a lot of oil to keep it from sticking but that's that's covered don't use butter to grease your pan it will burn and it will stick so absolutely use some sort of vegetable oil avocado oil of course is what i always go for okay let me show you how to shape a loaf now this this dough also makes cinnamon rolls so if you wanted to use this for cinnamon rolls you could roll this out in a square put butter and you know sprinkle some cinnamon sugar on top and this would be ready to go just like it is you can use this to make dinner rolls you can make cinnamon raisin bread you can make anything with this so to make a loaf what i usually do is push this out to kind of make well see how it's real springy see how it's pulling back on me like this this is a sign that my gluten needs a rest if you've ever bought pizza dough that was refrigerated and you're frozen even and when you saw it you try to use it and you try to roll it and all it does is fight with you this is a sign that the gluten strands we've built them up enough but they're they're wanting to like knot up so what we need to do is give this dough about five minutes and just let those gluten strands kind of relax down and it won't fight me so much so i'm gonna let this sit about five minutes before we try to shape our loaf so it's not so contrary and then i'll come back and i'll show you how to shape it sometimes you have to let your food do the talking it's giving me a signal that it's not ready so we just wait it makes everything easier if you don't fight with it so be back in a second okay all right so i gave this a few minutes and you can see as i pull on it now it's not fighting me nearly as hard as it was see how much softer it is so what we're going to do is i'm just going to kind of work this into a rectangular shape it's not anything exact i'm just going to kind of tug on it till i get it yeah like this and then i'm going to roll it up yup we're going to roll it like a sausage so we're going to roll this up and get it to here look how pretty that is now it's got a little mine's got a little air bubble in it right there so i'm just going to pop that out not a big deal okay then bring your loaf pan back in and just drop your drop your bread right inside just like that now and it's going to need to sit another hour roughly okay i want this bread to be a little over level with the pan so i'm going to try to show you see we've got a good couple of inches of space there so i want it maybe about an inch up above the pan and once it gets there it's thoroughly risen then we'll put it in the oven so sometimes the only thing that happens is that you if you under rise your loaf you'll get a little bit of like a cracking around the edges of it after you take it out of the out of the pan after baking and then if you override it it will collapse in the oven so we're going to just go if you were to you know rise it many inches above the top of the pan it might it might collapse in the oven but as long as we just go within an inch or so of the top of the pan we're going to be just fine so this is going to sit for about an hour and when it's ready i'll show you what it looks like i'm not going to put plastic wrap on the top of this because if i did the plastic wrap could stick and then if it sticks and you pull it off you've lost all of your air out of your bread and it's going to go and collapse on you so i'll just put i'm just going to leave it open that's what i'm going to do i'm going to leave it just like this i'll be back in about an hour and show you what it looks like a little over an hour later and we are so close to going in the oven so you can see that it's very much doubled in size and i very carefully want to see if i can tip this over so that you can see its height this is probably not a smart idea but you can see i'll take a picture i don't trust myself to do that it's um kind of jiggly can you can you see how it jiggles like it's got lots of air in it it's gonna be perfect we're gonna bake it at 400 in the center of that middle rack until it's golden and puffed up about 15 maybe 20 minutes something like that and then we're gonna let it cool completely if you slice it when it's still hot it tends to let all the moisture escape and your bread will be really dried out on you in just a couple of days you won't be able to enjoy it for very long so we'll give it you know plenty of time to cool maybe an hour or so and then i'll be back and i'll show you what it looks like the bread was in the oven for about i did 25 minutes just for good measure to make sure it was done all the way through and i wanted to show you a trick and people ask me of course they're going to want to know how do you know when your bread is done well i mean you can tap it on the bottom you can take its temperature it should be around 200 degrees internally if you have a thermometer that you can do that with but really it's i don't do any of those things i just trust my oven after all this time but i would say easily you know 25 minutes is going to be just fine but i want to show you what i do for getting the top because right now if you can hear that the top is kind of you know firm and crispy so i take a stick of butter we are butter eaters in this house and i just run this over the top while it's still very very hot i love to hear it like drip down in there and start to kind of sizzle when it hits the pan this will actually soften that top up and and make it really not not so crusty for you so i just rub that on a lot and then i'm going to take it out of the pan here it needs to cool about 10 minutes give or take in the pan before we put it on the the cooling rack but i'm going to go ahead and do it for you anyway it's not been 10 minutes start by loosening just take a knife and go around the edges shouldn't need much help these usa pans are so amazing and fabulous they typically don't need a lot of encouragement to get them out let's see because it is screaming hot okay woohoo look at that isn't she beautiful look you're gonna be able to do that in no time so this is a really a pretty properly risen loaf you don't see a whole lot of splitting around the edges right here if you see a picture of a loaf or you find bread that's got a great big wide split right here it just needed a little bit longer on its rise that's what usually happens with that we're going to let this cool completely and then i'm going to cut it open for you and you can see what the inside looks like all right it's the moment of truth you put in your work and we're going to go ahead and we're going to slice this so always use a serrated knife and make sure your bread is mostly cool mine's still a touch warm but let the knife do the work and oh oh my goodness isn't it beautiful perfectly risen i mean it's just exactly what you're looking for nice even even crumb in there yours may not look exactly like this but it's okay if it doesn't don't worry about it it will taste delicious so you can wrap this in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer what i actually do with mine because homemade bread is going to go bad in about about two days it's going to be pretty dry that makes you realize what's in store-bought bread when you when you see that so wrap it in plastic wrap sometimes what i'll do is actually cut my slices and then wrap the whole thing and freeze it and then just take out a slice at a time and either put it the toaster allow it to fall on the counter whatever i want to do with it sometimes i'll even make sandwiches with it and i'll make the sandwiches frozen with the frozen slices and then make the sandwiches stick in the lunch bag by the time they get to school or to work the bread's thawed out and it's just fine so it'll last in your freezer wrapped up really well six weeks four to six weeks if you wrap it really really well but on the counter you're only going to have a couple of days with it it probably won't last that long and i hope you really enjoy it this recipe can actually be found if you'll follow this video right here which is for my easy yeast rolls it's the same bread just there's a wasp on my hand let's get rid of him it's the same bread it's just made into a loaf instead of into into individual roles and baked up so you can find the recipe up on the feast and farm website and if you have any questions as always let me know talk to you later guys

Channel: Feast and Farm Cooks

Views: 1,327,678

Keywords: how to make yeast bread from scratch, yeast bread, how to bake bread, homemade bread recipe, bread recipe, bread recipe for beginners, yeast bread recipe

Id: phzRY8FDj4c

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020