Homemade Bread Making Series, Part I

This series teaches how to make delicious and moist bread by hand. Making bread by hand allows us to learn to read the dough. No recipe can give you 100% accurate measurement of flour and water. As bakers, we need to learn simple techniques for reading our dough. Please watch out my video (Bread Making Series, Part I) to help you with this process.

Ingredients:

2 cups (227 grams) hard white wheat flour

2 cups (227 grams All Purpose Bread flour (unbleached, organic)

1 teaspoon (6g) table salt

1 1/2 cups (340g) lukewarm water

1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast

1 tablespoon olive oil

Directions:

With a large mixing bowl, add all but one cup of the flour. (weigh flour using a scale to get accurate grams). If you do measure by cups, be sure to gently spoon flour into the cup to avoid too much flour.

Add salt and mix well. Add all but ½ cup of the water. Stir, and then mix in the yeast and oil. Mix well. Cover the dough and let rest for 30 minutes.

Then start your stretches and folds. We will do 4 sets of stretch and folds, with a 15-minute rest between each set. Each stretch and fold set allows us to see how the dough is progressing through bulk fermentation. Cover dough when it is resting to prevent the dough from drying out.

Stretch and Fold Technique:

First, I dip my hands in water to make them nonstick.

Then, I use my wet hands to pick up a side of the dough, stretch it, and fold it over. That’s one of four sets of stretch and folds.

Next, I rotate the bowl 180° (turn it so you’re now looking at the opposite side you just folded) and repeat. Then rotate the bowl 90° and do another stretch and fold. Finally, rotate the bowl 180°, do the last stretch and fold over. Cover the dough, set a timer, and wait 15 minutes to do the next set.

Lightly grease an 8 1/2” by 4 1/2" loaf pan, if making half of the dough into a loaf and the other half into buns. To make a larger loaf, place dough in a 9-1/2” by 5 x ½” greased loaf pan.

Shape the dough into an 8" log and place the log in the prepared pan.

Cover the pan loosely with greased plastic wrap and allow the bread to rise for about 45- 60 minutes, or until it's crowned about 1/2" above the edge of the pan.

Bake the bread in a preheated 375°F oven for 35 to 40 minutes. Its interior will register 195-200°F on an instant-read thermometer.

Remove the bread from the oven, turn it out of the pan, and cool loaf on a rack completely before slicing.

Enjoy!

Note: You'll may or may not need to use approximately 1 to 2 tablespoons less water in summer and 1 to 2 tablespoons more water in winter. Let your dough tell you when it is ready. (see video). When dough has enough flour, it will pull away from the sides of the bowl.

© Copyright 2023. Recipe Courtesy Shirleen Sando