Fresh Bread Recipe from Scratch
This is the BEST bread recipe that you can consistently make over and over again. Perfect for sandwiches, toast, or grilled cheese.
Equipment
- 1 Mixing bowl
- 1 Stand Mixer optional
- 1 Oven
- 1 Baking sheet
Ingredients
- 6 g Active dry yeast about 1.5 tsp
- 300 g Water about 1.5 cups
- 5 g Sea salt about 1 tsp
- 5 g Sugar about 1 tsp
- 12 g Olive Oil about 1 tbsp
- 420 g Flour 3.5 cups
Instructions
- Combine all ingredients together in the bowl of your stand mixer or a mixing bowl. Mix it on the 2nd setting for about 5 minutes. If you don’t have a mixer combine all the ingredients together and knead with your hands until a smooth dough is formed.
- Remove your dough from the Stand Mixer and place in on a clean floured work surface. Using your hands give it a little more kneading and form it into a ball.
- Once you have a smooth dough ball it is time to let it rise. Put about a tablespoon of olive oil in the bowl you used for step 1. Coat the dough ball with the oil, place in the bowl, and cover loosely. Let to dough rise for 2.5 to 3 hours.
- The dough is not going to look like much when you first remove it from the bowl after it rises. It’s going to be very soft and malleable. It needs to be flattened and folded onto itself repeatedly to start to build up some of the tension in the gluten strands. Using your thumb to fold the dough over it not only builds tension in the gluten but also help to shape the loaf by elongating the dough it to more of a cylinder shape. Keep flattening the dough and folding it over your thumb until the dough become firm to the touch like it was when it was before it rose the first time. It should be in a rough bread dough shape at this point. It doesn’t need to look pretty at this point as its going to rise again for 45 minutes and it will relax into a nice looking bread shape during that time. ***Pictures of how to do this are in the blog article.
- Place the finished dough loaf onto a baking sheet and cover. You can use plastic wrap for this but we prefer to use these Silicon Baking Sheets. Place the baking sheet with our dough on it onto the stove top above the oven and let the dough rise covered for 25 minutes.
- Preheat the oven on at 425 on the convection bake setting and let the dough rise another 20 minutes while the oven preheats. If your oven doesn’t have convection bake, regular bake will work fine. The bread will come out of the oven not quite as golden brown.
- Remove the covering from on top of the dough. Cut slits using a sharp knife to allow for air to escape during baking. If you don’t cut slits into the dough it’s very likely the side will burst open and mangle the loaf shape.
- Place it in the middle oven rack at the back of the oven. Place a oven safe container with a cup of water on the bottom oven rack to create humidity. We actually skip that step and just pour a 1/4 cup of water directly on the bottom of our oven which creates enough steam for us.
- Bake for 18 minutes and remove promptly. Remove finished bread from baking sheet and place onto a cooling rack.
- You’re bread should come out golden brown and smell amazing. You’ll be very tempted to dig right into it but you should restrain yourself for at least a little while. There are 2 very good reasons to wait. The fresh bread is so hot you could burn yourself on the steam that escapes when you tear into it, and also the bread actually keeps cooking a little bit after it’s removed from the oven. It’s is a good idea to wait at least 30 minutes after baking before cutting into the bread.