Bread recipe

Ingredients ¹

• 540g bread or all purpose flour
• 8g salt
• 324g water
• 5g active dry yeast
• 16g maple syrup (or sugar, honey etc.)
• 16g neutral oil (I use avocado lately)

Steps

All temps in farenheit.

1. Mix flour and salt together in a big bowl.
2. Stir yeast into ~100g of warm water. Record how much water you used to subtract out later.
3. Add syrup and oil to yeast mixture and let sit for like 10mins until there are bubbles/foam.
4. Add yeast mixture to dry ingredients and add the rest of the water.
5. Mix together until it forms a clump in the bowl, then dump out onto floured surface.
6. Knead for 10mins. It should form a dough that isn’t sticky but is malleable. Add a little flour/water if it’s too wet/dry.
7. Clean and lightly oil the big bowl from earlier. Round the dough by tucking your hands under it and turning until the top surface is taut.
8. First proof - Put the dough ball in the bowl (seam side down) and lightly oil the surface. Cover with a damp towel and leave in a warmish place until it’s 1.75x-2x the size. Like 30-45mins.
9. Shaping - punch out the dough and dump it onto the counter (very lightly flour the counter if you think the dough will stick). Stretch it out into a rough rectangle the width of your loaf pan about 1/2 to 1in thick. (If you want to mix in seeds / oats / olives spread them out on the dough now). Roll the dough up into a cylinder the length of your loaf pan. Tuck in the spiralled ends under the sides of the loaf.
10. Second proof - Oil the loaf pan and put in the shaped dough, oiling the top of it again. (If you want to add toppings do it now). Cover with a damp towel and let rise until it’s the size you want your loaf to be (it won’t rise much in the oven). 30mins-1hr.
11. Preheat your oven to 400°, remove the towel and cover the loaf loosely with foil. Bake on center rack for 20mins. Or bottom rack if you use a toaster oven like me.
12. Remove foil and bake for another 10-15mins until the top crust is a nice color. You can check that the temp in the middle is 190° if you’re not sure that it’s done.
13. Flip the loaf out into a cooling rack. Wait for it to fully cool before slicing. Done!

Notes

Multigrain

I make a multigrain loaf to adding some multigrain hot cereal to the dough. The important thing to remember is the total weight of flour + cereal should still be 540g. So I add 80g of hot cereal and use 460g bread flour. To add the hot cereal, after step 1 prepare the hot cereal with a bit more boiling water (I use ~200g for 80g cereal). Then wait for it to cool to yeast safe temp (<120°) and add the yeast/syrup/oil to that. Remember to subtract out the larger amount of water later.

Whole wheat

I haven’t done much experimenting with this. Most recently I added 60g (~10%) of whole wheat flour to the mixture and the bread came out great.

References: