looking up bread recipes (food that has been made by human beings for thousands of years) and every single one of them is like hi everyone today we’re making a simple no-mess instant yeast 2 loaf recipe that anyone can make. to start you’re going to need a stand mixer, a dutch oven, an industrial thresher to grind your flour, a piss carbonator, and 1 3/4 cups of water
I should probably put my Aunt Shirley’s “nearly every step is optional” french bread recipe on tumblr, I guess?
Things it's important to know about making bread
1) as OP said, bread has been made by humans since before we have written records. Every possible combination of wheat, salt, water, and leavening has been tried, and every combination that makes something remotely bread-like has been used by some culture somewhere. There is no wrong way to make bread. It can be hard to make the exact flavor/texture/density/shape you were going for, but it is really really hard to not end up with some kind of bread.
2) The reason it's so hard to make an exact bread of a particular type is that the things that influence bread are a bunch of things that are really hard to measure in a home kitchen: humidity, air pressure, temperature, the protein (gluten) content of the flour (which varies by the humidity/temperature of the field(s) where the wheat was grown), the age/health/composition of your leavening, the heat distribution in your oven, yadda yadda yadda ya. The algorithm that made this bread last week will not necessarily make the same bread this week, and the recipe that made the bread you want with this bag of flour will not necessarily make the bread you want with that bag of flour.
3) All the fancy equipment can mitigate these challenges to a certain extent, but so can just not caring about getting a particular flavor/texture/density/shape. If all you want is bread, then here are the things you need to know:
bread dough needs to be solid enough to hold its shape, and liquid enough to hold together. Anything in that range will make acceptable bread. If it's falling apart, add more liquid. If you can't pick it up because it runs through your fingers, add more flour.
kneading bread causes the wheat proteins to mix with other wheat proteins and with water to make gluten. It also (obviously) stirs the ingredients together more evenly. Gluten is chewy, elastic, and delicious, but there are also plenty of bread recipes (biscuits/scones, for example) that work hard to avoid making gluten, so you can have perfectly good bread without kneading. More kneading will make your bread dough capable of more rising (and thus make lighter bread), will make it more even, and will make it chewier; less kneading will make it go faster and make it softer/more tender. Choose your kneading level with that in mind.
Leavening is anything that produces gas -- yeast/sourdough starters, baking soda, whatever. If your bread rises too far, just knead it down and let it rise again: you can repeat this process as often as you like, until your leavening runs out of fuel to make gas with. So, like, not infinitely, but you can usually get away with one extra round if you let it rise too far.
Bread is done when it stops being a liquid lump, and becomes a solid thing with holes in it -- ie, it becomes hollow. You can therefore tell if bread is done by tapping on it -- if it sounds hollow, it's done. If it makes a dull thud, it needs more time. Lower heat makes longer baking times, but the heat will be distributed more evenly through the bread. Higher heat goes faster, but it has to be very carefully calibrated to make sure the middle gets baked before the outside gets burned.
So, with those rules in mind, you can now ignore all instructions in any bread recipe, and just mix up the ingredients they suggest, in the proportions they suggest, and use your judgement about kneading time, rising time, baking temperature, and baking time. Go forth and modify food bloggers' bread recipes like the little bread anarchist you are!
But if you'd like the most basic possible recipe, here's what my Aunt Shirley uses.
Aunt Shirley's notes in (), my notes in []
French Bread
Makes 2 loaves [my memory is that this was enough to accompany a spaghetti dinner for 2 grown men, 3 boys, 1 grown woman, and 1 girl]
[Equipment needed: a bowl, a cooking sheet, an oven Equipment that's useful: measuring devices, a spoon]
Place in bowl in this order:
1.5 cups warm water (yeast temp. 110 degrees) [most hot tubs are set between 101 and 105 degrees, so this wants to be a little bit warmer than you'd want your hot bath to be]
2.25 tsp yeast (sprinkle over water) [when Aunt Shirley was showing me this recipe for the first time, she said "observe how important it is to measure carefully when making bread" and then grabbed the box of yeast and just sprinkled a bunch directly onto the water. If you use too little, your bread will take longer to rise and/or be flatter. If you use too much, you'll have wasted some yeast. Approximations are perfectly fine.]
2tbls + 2 tsp sugar [I'll be honest, I've never measured this in my life. I take the bottle of honey and I squeeze some into the water. Any form of sugar will do; you're just giving the yeast some tasty snacks to wake it up, so honey, maple syrup, orange juice, potato starch... it's all good. You can also skip this if you want -- the flour will wake the yeast up, it'll just be slower to do it, so the bread will take longer to rise and/or be flatter.]
2 tsp salt (I use 1.5)
1/3 cup dry milk (optional) [this was her way of adding protein to the bread. You can use a protein supplement like whey or soy protein isolate, or add an egg or something, or just skip it entirely.]
1.5 Tbls oil [any oil is fine, just remember to consider flavor: olive oil will be great with spaghetti, but may taste weird for french toast. Solid oils like butter/ghee/lard/etc are also fine, but harder to stir in.]
stir and let stand a few minutes (cookbook says 10)
add 4 cups white flour, stir in all at once [You can use any combination of white or whole-wheat here. Whole wheat absorbs more liquid than white, so you'll need less of it, but as long as the loaf holds together you're fine. Also feel free to add in something weird just cuz you feel like it: almond meal, rye, corn flour, whatever.]
Knead (optional)
cover and let rise until almost double [you can skip this step if you're in a hurry]
dump out of pan onto a floured board.
Knead (optional)
Divide in half. Shape into loaves and place on a greased (shortening) cookie sheet [solid fats do a better job of staying on the sheet than liquid fats do. If you want to use a liquid fat to grease the cookie sheet, then dip the bread loaf in olive oil right before you put it on the sheet. You can also use a cookie sheet liner like a silpat or something]
Let rise until half-doubled.
Bake somewhere between 350 and 400 degrees for 20 minutes or so [keeping in mind the notes above about baking times and temperatures]
