FOCUSED INTENT: Homemade Bread Recipe. Delicious. Fresh. Good.

Homemade Bread Recipe. Delicious. Fresh. Good.

I have found that a lot of people are fearful of the seemingly complicated process of making bread. It appears to be complicated and packed with steps and considerable work.

In reality, bread is really easy to make at home and you only need several main ingredients to make a basic loaf. Here is precisely how to make a tasty loaf at home.

Equipment needed:

Two large mixing bowls.

One spoon to stir the dough.

Measuring cups.

Measuring spoons.

A bread pan.

A hand towel to cover the dough as it rises.

Ingredients:

Homemade Bread Recipe. Delicious. Fresh. Good.

1/4 cup milk

5 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon of salt

5 teaspoons butter

1 package active dry yeast

3 1/2 cups flour

Nonstick cooking spray to prevent the bread from sticking to the bowl & pan

Directions (Recipe):

Warm up the bowl with hot water.

After the bowl has been warmed, pour the hot water out in the sink.

Mix up the yeast according to the directions on the packet.

(Stir the yeast until there are no lumps in it.)

Melt the butter in the microwave, then add the melted butter, milk, sugar, and the salt to the yeast liquid and stir it up until everything looks like a light tan liquid.

Homemade Bread Recipe. Delicious. Fresh. Good.

Add two cups of flour to the mix. (Don’t add the rest of the flour yet.)

Start stirring the mix, and then add the flour about 1/4 cup at a time while mixing. This mixture will stick to the spoon. Don’t worry. Keep stirring and adding flour until the dough is still slightly sticky. Keep up the mixing until the dough does not stick to your hands in any considerable way. Note that the mixture should clean the sides of the bowl.

Kneading:

Kneading

Put a touch of flour on the table where you are going to knead the dough. Do this a few times until there is an area on the table lightly covered in flour. Then take the dough ball out of the bowl, punch it down on the table, and start pounding it. Do this for ten minutes. Just take the dough, punch it flat, then fold it back up into a ball again, and repeat several times. I like to take it in my hands and squash and twist it.

After ten minutes shape the dough into a ball then take the dough and put it in the second clean bowl. Coat the inside of the clean bowl lightly with nonstick cooking spray then put the ball of dough inside the bowl.

Put the cloth over the bowl and sit it someplace relatively warm for an hour. A warming area on top of you stove top is a great place to put the bowl. Clean the mess and put everything away, except leave the flour out and keep the floured area on the table.

After an hour, the dough should be roughly double the size. Take the dough out of the bowl and punch the dough down until it shrinks down to normal size. Lay the dough out on the floured area and spread it out in a rectangle shape, with one side being approximately the length of the bread pan and the other side being approximately a bread pan and a half long. Then, roll it the dough up so that the roll is roughly the same size as the bread pan. Spray the bread pan down with nonstick cooking spray and put the loaf inside of the pan. Cover that loaf up with the towel, put it back where it was before, and wait an hour. Now it is time to clean everything up. The loaf should raise some more during this hour.

After an hour, uncover the pan and put the loaf in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) for thirty minutes. After thirty minutes, take the pan out of the oven and using oven mitts, remove it from the pan to cool.