Homesteading Skills: Baking Bread

Slices for Papa's lunch, bread never lasts long around here. This is half a loaf.

Every 3-4 days I bake us up two fresh loaves of bread. There's nothing terribly special about the recipe, but it makes a mean sandwich loaf and can easily be scaled up or down. You can also use the dough to make rolls or bread sticks to go with whatever you're cooking for dinner. Here's the recipe:

2c. All Purpose Flour
1T. yeast
2T. sugar
1T. oil
2c. warm milk
3c. bread flour
1.5t. salt

First you mix the APF, yeast and sugar in a mixing bowl. Next add your oil and milk and mix well, it will be soupy and lumpy. Then slowly add your bread flour, half a cup at a time while mixing. I turn on my KitchenAid to the 'mix' setting with the dough hook and add my flour as it mixes. Mix for 6-7 minutes until a ball forms and it's pulling away from the bowl at the sides. It should look like this:

Kind of lumpy dough ball.

  Let the dough rest for 20 minutes or so and then knead the salt into it. Once you've added the salt form it up into a ball and let it rise for 60-90 minutes while it's covered with a damp tea towel. Dough likes to rise in a warm room so in the winter I put it in my oven with the light on and during the spring before we turn the A/C on it just sits on the counter. 

Dough before the first rise.

After an hour to an hour and a half it should be about double in size.

Dough after the first rise, doubled in size.

Once your dough has risen take it from the bowl and form it into two loaves. Of course, at precisely the time you do this your Tiny Person will have a meltdown. Solve this by offering an overpriced fruit pouch reserved for such emergencies.

Adorable baby, hideous linoleum.

Here are my two loaves:

Let these rise for about 45 minutes and then turn on the oven to preheat to 375 degrees. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of them after they rose because I was putting Baby to sleep and Papa was the one to put them in the oven. Bake them for 20-25 minutes until the tops are light brown and the middles read 180 degrees on a thermometer.

Right out of the oven

After a minute or two I slide them out of the pans and butter the tops. You should really let them cool on a cooling rack, which I improvise by propping up one of my oven racks that we've removed from the oven.

 

So there you have it, homemade bread!