Hi I’m Glen and welcome to legourmet.tv. Today is bread making 101. Now, I hear the collective sigh out there that bread is difficult, bread is a formula. You have to measure your ingredients carefully. You really need the scale to make it. Well, it is all those things but at the same time, it can be that easy, really simple.

Today, we’re going to make a little from, just basic white bread. This recipe is from the side of the bag of flour. You don’t even need a great recipe book.

So first, we’re going to start with our water. I’ve got here lukewarm water. It should be warm enough that your finger doesn’t scald when you put it in. That’s about a 110ºF, maybe 40ºC.

I started off, dissolve a little bit of sugar into our water. That’s just to get the yeast started. So, we dissolved that in. Now it’s one pocket of quick rising yeast. Now, a pocket is about 2 ¼ teaspoons, oh sorry, 2 ¼ teaspoons. Let’s get that right. So we mix that into our water. We’re going to let that stand for about 10 minutes. The yeast will start to bloom. It will develop. It will froth up and then we can use it the rest of the recipe.

So while our yeast is blooming, we’ll move on to the next step. In this bowl, I’ve got some scalded milk, to which I’m going to add some butter, some sugar and some salt. So just mix this together. The butter will melt in the milk because the milk is good and hot.

And now, we’ll temper it and bring the temperature down a little bit with this water. Here that’s good. Excellent! So you can see here that the yeast is frothing up quite a bit. It’s very active and it’s just about ready for the next step.

Okay, so we mix our yeast into the milk mixture. Get that all in there. Just kind of mix it in nice and easy. Love that yeasty smell. Just starts to smell like bread, almost when we get our dough.

Now to this, we’re going to add our flour. So here I’ve got 4 ½ cups of bread flour. We’re going to add in ½ and mix it together really well. We’re going to get like butter. Put a ½ of it in there. Okay so you mix this up really well. It’s kind of jolliness. It’s all sticking together. That looks really good.

Okay, so now that we’ve got the butter mixed up, we’ll slowly mix in the rest of the flour. We just want to get to the point where it doesn’t stick to the side of the bowl. And if you reach that point before you’ve used all of the flour, that’s fine. It will just only absorb as much as it need.

Okay, so we’ve got a bowl of dough which no longer sticks into the side of the bowl and we’re ready to turn it out onto our surface. So I flour up the surface and we’ll turn it out we’ll knead it.

Okay, so now that the dough has pulled away and it’s not sticking to the sides of the bowl, we’re going to turn it out onto our surface and we want the next step which is kneading. Not as difficult as everyone make you think.

First, we’ll just put a little bit of flour out on the counter. You don’t want to add too much because you don’t want it to soak up too much flour at this point. We put our bread ball out and we’ll just start to knead.

Now, you need to knead for about 10 minutes. You’re going to know when you’ve had enough. Still a little bit sticky, but that’s okay. Heel of your palm, push down, I’m going to quarter turn each time. This is something that you just got to find the feel. It’s going to be hard at first because you’re not going to know what you need to do. And if it sticks, just a little bit more flour on the board and everything will be fine.

So about an hour has gone by and you can see how the loaf has pretty much an inch out of the pan, same with our free form loaf.