Bless the Broken Road

This Weekend I Made: Bread

Jun 22, 2009 Food & Cooking

That is a picture of the bread that I baked myself Saturday morning. Last week I was looking through the archives of a finances blog I read, The Simple Dollar, and found a recipe for homemade bread. Recently I have been trying to cook more and as the recipe didn’t look too hard  I wanted to give it a try. As I thought,making the bread wasn’t that hard, and when it was all done it did taste really good.

Now I do want to give Trent over at The Simple Dollar the credit he deserves so do please go over there for pictures of the process and details but I will give you the recipe in summary here:

Ingredients:

One large mixing bowl
One spoon
One 1/4 cup measuring cup
One 1/2 cup measuring cup
One teaspoon
One bread pan
One hand towel

1/4 cup milk
5 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoons salt
5 teaspoons butter
1 package active dry yeast
2 1/2 to 3 1/2 cups flour
Corn starch or nonstick cooking spray

Directions:

1. Prepare the yeast in the mixing bowl per the directions on the yeast packet.
2. Melt the butter in the microwave and add it to the bowl along with the milk, sugar, and salt and mix together well.
3. Add in 2 cups of flour and stir it all up so that it clumps together.
4. Keep stirring and add a 1/4 cup of flour every minute or so until the dough doesn’t stick to the spoon or yours hands very much.
5. Lightly spread some flour over the table or counter you will kneed the bread on.
6. Take the bread out of the bowl and knead it for 10 minutes.
7. Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a clean bowl and cover it with a towel, let rise for an hour.
8. Punch the dough down so that it flattens out some and take it out of the bowl.
9. Lay out the dough so it is about the length of the bread pan and about a bread pan and a half wide.
10. Roll the dough lengthwise and place it in the breadpan, the side with the ’seam’ downward. (Don’t forget to spray the pan before you put the bread in.)
11. Cover the bread pan with the towel and let the bread rise for another hour.
12. Set your over to 400° F and let it cook for a half-hour.
13. Take the bread out of the oven right away and remove it from the bread pan, let it cool.
14. Eat!

So, that’s how I made my bread, pretty simple, eh? Yes, it took a few hours but most of that time was waiting for the dough to rise. During that time I read, watched a movie, checked my email. The big thing with the bread was making sure I did the next step after the appropriate amount of time. If the directions I posted here were not through enough, or you would like to see pictures of each step, check out Trent’s origional post as he went into much greater detail for each step…not to mention it’s really his recipe in the first place!

This being my first food & cooking post I would like to hear back from you if you liked it…or didn’t. Hopefully I will be doing more of these as I find more interesting recipes because I really enjoyed making this bread and I look forward to trying new stuff as well. What things do you usually cook/bake/etc? Do you have any recipes you think I would like? Feel free to share them or the link in the comments.

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