How to make homemade bread
Hey, it's
Vanessa from CraftyGemini. com. Today
I'm going to teach you how to make bread. Yes! You don't need any fancy
machines or breadmakers or anything like that.
All youneed is what you see on the table right here. So let me walk you through everything. Here
you need a bowl, obviously. I prefer
glass but you can also use a plastic bowl. You're going to need a whisk and a
wooden spoon. Then you're going to have
a measuringcup with one and a half cups of hot water. Here I have some honey, and I'll show youhow
we use this in a second. A half-cup
measuring cup; some measuring spoons.
Salt and oil;I have Olive Oil but you can use any oil you like to put in
your bread. Here is the yeast, of course.
And then we have two different types of flour. You canjust use white bread flour, you can
use just whole wheat, or you can mix them like I do. I find that just the whole
wheat makes the bread way too dense for my flavor. So I liketo mix them both, and I'll show you
what the ratio is when we start mixing things up. Solet's get started. First thing we do is
take some hot water. Make sure it's not
just lukewarm. You wantit to be like hot
bath water, somewhere around 103 to 108 degrees. I never actually use athermometer. I just gauge it by hand and I've never had a
problem. I'll show you what
you'relooking for. Now, the honey, I'm going to drizzle just a touch in there,
because the yeast actuallyfeeds on this.
So make sure you don't put a lot, especially if you're making
savorybreads because you don't want the honey flavor to come out; you're just
using that to feedthe yeast. I move it
around with my whisk just to dissolve it.
If you're using sugar,go through the exact same process. Now comes our
yeast. For the one and a half cup of
water I put, I want to put one anda half teaspoons of the yeast. And notice what I'm going to do: You're not
mixing itin, you're just sprinkling it across the top. That's one teaspoon and then I'm going toget
the half. And the same thing. Just
sprinkle it, don't move it, don't touch it.
Just take a cleandish towel and cover it up. Now you're going to let it sit for five
minutes. After five to seven minutes, this is what you want your yeast to look
like. It looksa little puffy to the top
and it's one sheet across the entire top of the bowl. If youryeast doesn't look puffy like this,
you want to just dump this out and redo it.
Make surethat the water's a little bit warmer, maybe it wasn't warm
enough, or maybe it was toohot, so just try it again. And once you get a feel for it this won't be
a problem. LikeI said earlier, I've
never had a problem with the temperature; just try to go for a hotbath water.
Now I'd like to start with the whole wheat flour. Going to add a half cup -- here's ahalf cup
measurement -- of the whole wheat flour.
Just level it off like that. And
you'rejust going to dump it directly into your bowl. And this is where you want to really
whiskthis up to activate all the gluten and the flour with the yeast and
all. So, you seehow it's nice and
frothy, just keep whisking it for about 30 to 45 seconds or so. If you want to
add more whole wheat flour, you can go ahead and do so at this point. Some
people just use whole wheat flour. I
tend to find that it's too dense, so I liketo do a mixture. So half a cup is all I'll use in this batch,
so I'll put away the wholewheat flour. And now, at this point, I like to add
the salt and the oil. So, I like to add
two teaspoonsof salt to this one-and-a-half cup of water that we started
with. So here's my teaspoonmeasurement. There's one.
Some people find this too salty, but if you want you can startoff with
one teaspoon and then go from there. And
that's two. Move that around. (Whisking. )Now the oil. I'm going to add one tablespoon of oil, and
I'm going to be using Olive Oiltoday because I want this flavor in here. But, again, I said you can use Canola Oilor
whatever oil you want to use. So just
one tablespoon, just like that. Whisk
that together. And now we're just going to add our regular white bread flour. And you're going to addthe flour in half-cup
increments, okay, because you don't want to overflour your stuff. Youwant to mix in every half cup and keep
going, until I show you the consistency you're lookingfor. So here's half a
cup; add one. And I'll usually add
whatever my mixings will be right nowafter I put in this second half cup of
flour. Because it's still kind of
liquidy and youcan mix things in here nicely.
So, for example, if you wanted to make Rosemary baguettes,I would chop
up either some fresh or dried Rosemary and dump it in right now. You canadd anything you want, really;
raisins, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, anything. I mean, at this point you can
make the bread into whatever kind of bread you want. So it'sreally great to just play around with
different ingredients you have in your house and seewhat you come up with. I've actually even put pumpkin puree, canned
pumpkin puree inhere and it turns out great, it's really moist. If you want the bread to be a little bit
chewy,go ahead and crack an egg or two in here if you want that, just play
around with it. It'sa really versatile
recipe. Now I'm going to add another half a cup. Now, notice I'm still using the whisk but
you'llsee after I mix this in it's going to be a little too clumpy for me to
keep using thewhisk, so this is where I'm going to switch over and actually use
my wooden spoon to juststir this stuff around. Okay. So I'm going to put that aside. Add another half cup, and use my wooden
spoon,and just mix it around until it's all incorporated and just keep going.
And the reason I don't tell you specific amounts of flour to use in total in
this batch isbecause it really does depend on how much moisture there is in the
air. If you livein a more humid climate,
you'll need to add a little bit more flour than if you live somewherea little
bit dryer. So I'm really just going to
show you a close-up shot of how you wantthe consistency of your dough to look
like. Add another half cup of flour, and just keep stirring. And really this is not so hard. Just takes a
little elbow grease and that's all it really takes. You don't need an expensive,fancy breadmaker
or a mixer or anything like that. I have
one of those big commercial mixersand I don't even use it for this, because
really it's unnecessary. Another half
cup. And you're going to keep doing this in half-cup increments until you get
to a point wherethe spoon can almost no longer turn or stir the dough, because
it's all into one hugeball. I can still see it's a little bit loose, so I'll
incorporate the rest of this in there. Just keep going. You see how it's getting together; it's all
combining itself into onebig ball.
Okay. Still a little loose, it's
not exactly how I want it. And do you see how it kind of still sticks to the
spoon? Before you dump it out on yourworking surface to knead it out, you want
to get it to where it's not just stretchinglike that. Another half cup of flour. You can see how it's not sticking to my
spoonany more. You see that? Okay. That's how you want it to be. And I just take
a little bit of flour, sprinkle it around like that. Then you're going todump your dough right on
to your work surface. And it's okay if
it's kind of in a few differentchunks, we're going to bring it all
together. Make sure you wash your hands
for this partand just start combining everything. You see how it's kind of
still sticking to me? You see that there? You don't want that. So we're going
to get another half cup, and don't put the whole half cup in. I just liketo sprinkle it a little bit, push
it into the dough with my hands, and then I'm foldingit in from the inside out
like this -- I mean from the outside in.
Okay. Because it's okay if the dough kind of sticks to you a little bit,
but you don't want itto just peel off like it was doing earlier. You want to try and get it as dry as you
canwithout overflouring it. You see right
there, it's still too wet, so I'll put a little moreflour there. And this is
the kneading part. Everybody has their
own kind of style of doing this.
Sometimeswhen I get real into it I'll use the heels of my hands, kind of
push it in there. You can see my fingers are no longer sticking to it so this
is pretty good. And then youwant to
knead it, it sounds like a lot but maybe like 100 or 150 times or so, which
isnot that much. It just takes a few
minutes. (Music. )So now that my dough is nice and tight, you can hear
that. It sounds -- (tapping) -- justlike
that. Now you're going to take a clean bowl and use a little oil, whatever oil
you used insidethe bread is fine, and just a little drizzle. Okay.
Now with that oil in there, just takeyour clean fingers and rub it
around, all the way to the top edge and all that. Youtake your ball of dough, put it in, kind
of swirl it around, turn it out, and then plumpit in the other way. And then
just take your clean dish towel, cover it, and just put it somewhere to restfor
about 30 to 45 minutes. And what you
want to see is that the ball doubles in size.
Inthis bowl it'll probably reach almost to the top, and that's what we
want to see. After about 40 minutes, this is what you end up with. Okay.
What you want to do now, justtakes a few seconds, literally just going
to punch it down with my hand. You see
howit's like a bag that deflates? Just like that. And now you're going to cover it back up
andput it right back where you had it for another 30 to 40 minutes. So here's
my dough after the second rise and it went a little higher than the first
time,just because I had it close to the stove where I was cooking something
else. So you see it'snice and puffed up;
see all the air bubbles there in the dough pretty much. We're goingto dump it out on our surface
again, flour it a little bit. And here we're not necessarily kneading it for
the same reasons that we did before, butwe're actually going to just knead it
just enough to get the air out. A little
too muchthere. Just knead it enough to
get the air out. That dough looks good.
Now you want to separate it into whatever pieces of bread you're going to
decide tomake out of this. So you can
make baguettes, which are long ones, and I'll do one of those. Let me cut a chunk
off here, and just work with it so it doesn't stick like that to yourhands. And
notice what I'm doing, this is how I like to do it. I kind of just roll it and tuckthose edges
under, so I get a smooth side on the top. And just to stretch it out, depending
how long you want it to be. Just play
with it. It's like dough, like any other kind of dough, you can make whatever
you want out of it withthe kids, you can make funky shapes and things like
that. So there's one. And here I'm using
a nonstick surface on a big cookie sheet type thing. You can use justregular spray nonstick on a
regular cookie sheet if you have a nonstick one. If you don't,you can just use parchment
paper. Anything that just won't allow
the bread to stick andthat'll work fine. So let me show you how you can make
some dinner rolls also. I just tuck all
those edges inand that's how you get a nice smooth surface, okay. So just tuck all that in there. Nicelittle ball like that, just put it
there. And you want to give your bread
space becausethey're going to rise first and then they'll rise even more after
you bake it. (Music. )To give the bread a little decorative touch, I like to
take a sharp knife and just go andcut slits into the top of the bread, not too
deep. But it just adds a little
something. To the circle ones, you can do whatever you want. And then we're going to set this entiretray
aside to rest. And at this point what I like to do is actually preheat my oven,
so that in the time thatthe oven is preheating my bread is rising, getting
ready to go in the oven. So now that the bread has risen and it's almost ready
to go inside the oven, what I like todo to add a little extra shine on top of
the bread once it's done is to make some egg wash. So all you need is an egg. Crack it into a little bowl or cup, add a
little bit of water,and then just beat the egg up. Then you're going to brush this mixture onto
the top ofthe bread. Take my brush and
just brush it on. I'm going to put this tray into the oven at 375 degrees like
I said earlier. And for thisamount of
bread for one tray, and given that I didn't make it into just one huge ball,I'm
going to probably put this in the oven for about 35 minutes and then I'll check
it,and I'll show you how to check once we get to that stage. If I were to put
all of this dough into one big ball, you'd probably want to leave itin for
about 45 to 50 minutes and then check.
If you made a bunch of small little balls,then probably put it in for 30
minutes and check; so kind of, you just gauge it. Baking bread is not like some
of the other baked pastries and things you make, that ifyou open the oven you
completely ruin it. Don't worry about
it. After 30 to 35 minutes,you're safe
to open it, check it; if it needs a little more time, you can just put it
backin and go from there. So our bread is finished baking, it's come out of the
oven. This batch went in for about35
minutes at 375 degrees. As you can see
I've already let them cool a little bit.
NowI want to show you how to check to make sure that your bread is
cooked through. If it'sstill in the oven
and you're kind of going on the minutes and you're not sure that it'sdone or
not, just grab an oven mitt, pull one out, and you want to tap the underside.
If it sounds like this -- (tapping) -- nice and hollow, then you know the bread
is cookedthrough. If it's still a little
soggy or it doesn't sound hollow, put it right back infor another three to five
minutes and then check it again. If you're going to eat it, it's good to go as
soon as it comes out of the oven. Now,if
you're going to store it, you want to make sure that you let the bread cool
completelyand come to room temperature before you put it in a plastic bag, but
they do store wellin both the fridge and the freezer. Okay?I hope you all enjoyed my tutorial and I
hope that you'll go out and try making your ownbread at home, because it's
really easy. Also, if you all throw in
different ingredientsand things, I would love to hear your comments on some new
ideas to make different typesof bread at home.
Sourch:http://iam4you-kh.blogspot.com/search/label/BREAKFAST
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