Halloweenish things could not be just 7 weeks away. My brain simply could not comprehend this. I started to feel really dumb, but that did not stop me from continually scrolling up and down on my calendar, confused. Where’s the other “ber” month?? One time a friend at church told us that in the Philippines where he is from, “any month that ends in “ber” is a Christmas month.” Ha! They know how to do it. (I’ve also heard that Europeans don’t understand all the American’s fuss about a time limit on Christmas festivities, because they have no Thanksgiving bookend at the beginning. European friends, what say you? Is Mariah Carey in August a go? Just kidding!!) Okay okay sorry I’ll stop freaking you out with all the holiday talk. We’ve got plenty of time and space for it all, and even a holiday-less September to revel in! Well, besides Labor Day. My sister Laura and her husband have been telling their kids for years that Labor Day is a day for work, so they always schedule huge family house projects. When their kids grow up and realize it’s supposed to be a day OFF from work they are going to be livid. As our thoughts turn less toward Mariah Carey and more toward sane things like Back-to-School, I have the perfect recipe for you. It’s always the right time of year for homemade bread, but homemade white bread that is perfect for making the Most Amazing Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich Of Your Life? Or how about The Perfect Slice of Buttered Toast? Oh yeah. Charlotte is in the middle, for those of you who have been around a while and want to be shocked about her tweenhood and braces. What even, right?? We made the bread for our mid-week activity, and gave some of it to the church to be used as our sacrament bread on Sunday. Completely unrelated to this, our bishop received a request from a member of our congregation to “please ask the priests to stop breaking the sacrament bread into tiny minuscule pieces, it’s weird.” (our priests are young men, 16-18 years old, and this sounds like a snarky request to make…but it was kind of accurate 😂) So the bishop told them, and that Sunday our dear priests broke the biggest sacrament bread pieces of all time, giant hunks of our delicious homemade fresh bread. It was a great Sunday. The Lord provides, amen. NOT TODAY FOLKS! This recipe has secrets that I will tell you all about. The resulting bread is perfectly fluffy, with the best texture. The special ingredient (vital wheat gluten) not only provides great flavor, but also improves our bread’s elasticity and creates a better crumb and chewiness in the final product. The resulting bread is soft and tender, perfect for sandwich-making. The dough is beautiful and easy to work with, the flavor robust. And get this…the finished bread can be done in just about ONE HOUR (maybe an hour and 10). Yes you read that right, only ONE rise required for this bread. Say whaaaa?
Instant yeast. The magic maker! Instant yeast bubbles and activates a lot faster than active dry yeast, so it’s great if you are in a hurry. Regular yeast will work just fine though! Put on your patience pants! Bread flour. Bread flour is made for bread! It has higher protein levels than all-purpose flour. This protein is what makes gluten. Gluten is the magical thing that forms when you knead flour and water together. Long strands of gluten form a grid that traps and holds gases made by yeast. It is the framework that allows our bread to rise. Without the framework of gluten, the gas (carbon dioxide) released from your yeast will escape and float away, and your bread won’t rise. Vital Wheat Gluten. Bread flour has lots of protein in it. Vital Wheat Gluten IS protein. Some genius took the important part of flour (the important part for rising, anyway) and isolated it. When you add a little of this to your dough, you get bread that is even better at building the framework I mentioned, sometimes called dough structure. Your yeast will have LOTS of space to grow and rise with all the extra gluten you’ve given it! This will make your bread rise sky-high, giving it an airy, light texture. I love to add a lil vital wheat gluten to all my bread, but it’s especially important to use it in a one-hour cheater bread recipe like this one, where we are skipping a rise. Not only that, it is a flavor booster as well. I’m a little obsessed with it. Lotsa salt, I only use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. This recipe makes 2 loaves and calls for 7 teaspoons kosher salt. Yes 7 teaspoons, for real. It might sound like a lot, but I promise you it’s perfect. Under-salted bread is one of life’s greatest tragedies. It doesn’t matter how perfectly your bread rises, how golden your crust is; if you forgot the salt, it will taste like cardboard. Warm water activates our yeast Oil (I like olive oil, any type of oil will do) provides fat and flavor for our bread. Sugar makes our bread delicious, and helps with browning. I use 1/3 cup because I like my bread a little sweet. You can decrease this amount to 1/4 cup if you want!
First combine your water, sugar, and yeast (in your stand mixer, if you have one). I love to use this Platinum yeast from Red Star. It’s instant yeast and it bubbles SUPER fast. This brand also has dough enhancers that make for a really nice loaf, I highly recommend it (although it is a little pricey.) Any instant yeast will do ya just fine. I tried this recipe many times with both instant and regular active dry yeast; there is a pretty significant difference. Instant yeast (any brand) proofs faster and rises faster. So if you are in a rush it’s definitely worth using. But either one will work great! If you are new to bread making, wait just a minute to make sure your yeast bubbles or foams. If your water was too hot, the mixture will stay flat and won’t foam, and it’s time for a little funeral because you’ve killed the yeast. But once you see those little bubbles, any amount at all, you can move forward with the recipe. Next add your vital wheat gluten, olive oil, and kosher salt. Do you see that big pile of white stuff? It’s not the sugar. IT’S THE SALT. And there is a ton of it, 7 teaspoons to be exact. Don’t be a scaredy cat. This bread has a little over 1 teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt per cup of flour and it’s glorious. So many people are overly cautious when it comes to salting. Over salted food can be awful, for sure, but I promise, this is not too much salt. (If you are not using this exact brand of salt, use less! Morton’s coarse kosher salt is NOT the same.) The last ingredient is bread flour! Here’s how I like to measure flour: Use a cup to fill another cup, then level off. This way you make sure you are not packing in your flour, which could result in a tough, heavy bread. I always measure my flour this way, it’s much more accurate (not as accurate as weighing it, but I’m still American for heaven’s sake. I have some boundaries.) At this point I switched to my stand mixer bowl. Start the whole project in your stand mixer if you have one. I only used the glass one so you could see in the bowl better. When you get to about this point, switch to using your dough hook, or if you are kneading by hand, set your spoon aside, flour your hands and get ready to get jiggy wit it. Here is my dough after 5 minutes of kneading. It’s still pretty tacky. Knowing when to stop adding flour is a bit of an art that comes with practice, but have confidence. You want enough flour that your dough has enough structure to rise, but not so much that it becomes dried out and heavy. I stopped adding flour right BEFORE my dough had formed a shapely ball inside the mixer. Scrape it onto a work surface and knead a couple times to form a ball. Then use a serrated knife to cut the dough in half. Use your hands to shape one half of the dough into a rectangle that’s about the size of your loaf pan, about 9×5 inches. Make sure the smoothest side of your dough is on the bottom, I usually turn my dough over. Roll it up from the long end. Use your fingers to pinch the dough, then your hands to fold each end underneath slightly, and place in a greased 9×5 pan. Cover with plastic wrap that you have absolutely drenched with non stick spray. Trust me, you do not want to have to tear ungreased plastic off the top of your dough when it’s ready for the oven, it will ruin your rise and you will cry real tears. Not that I would know. Here she is after just 15 minutes in the slightly-warmed oven. And again after another 10-15 minutes while the oven preheats. Just look at this puffy beast!!! And now, we bake about 25-30 minutes. You will know your bread is done when it is well-browned on top, the sides are pulling away from the edge of the pan, and the bottom and edges of the bread are browned. I always use a thermometer, which should measure about 200 degrees F. When you take your bread out of the oven, let it rest in the pan for about 1 minute, then use hot pads to invert and remove the bread to a cooling rack. I like to cool my bread on its side. This helps the bread stay nice and tall. We worked so hard for this beautiful rise, we don’t want to let gravity get the last word here. If you pop your bread out of the pan and are horrified to realize that the bottom has not browned, never fear. Put the loaf right back into the pan and stick it back in the oven. This is one of the benefits of removing the bread from the pan immediately after taking it out of the oven. (If you wait more than a minute or two, it’s pretty hopeless if your bread is under baked.) Then, if you know what’s good for you, take a stick of butter while your bread is still hot, and smear it all over the top. Yesssss, drip my buttery queen. And then the final, hardest step: wait. You HAVE to wait for your bread to cool, for at least 30 minutes, or you risk smashing your bread into oblivion. Don’t be that guy. And that’s it guys! It really is so easy, and takes just about an hour start to finish! That said, there is an easy way to make this bread more complex, meaning it tastes even better: let the dough rise longer, even multiple times. The longer your dough has a chance to sit and ferment (at any point before baking), the more flavor it will develop. This slower fermentation (rising) gives the dough a chance to develop acids and esters, which give the final bread a rich, wheat-y aroma, as well as a slight tang. The acid also serves to strengthen the gluten strands in your dough, encouraging your bread to rise up instead of out to the side. And it’s easy. It just takes time. Here are some rising options you can use for this bread recipe:
Make the dough as instructed and let rise for 1 hour in a greased bowl. Punch down, shape loaves, and proceed with the recipe as written, waiting to bake your loaves until they have more than crowned the top of the pan. Make the dough as instructed and let rise for 1 hour. Punch down and let rise 1 more hour. Proceed with the recipe as written, waiting to bake your loaves until they have more than crowned the top of the pan. Let the dough rest overnight. If you choose this method, you need to decrease the amount of yeast in the recipe to 1 tablespoon, otherwise your chilling dough will explode all over your fridge! Place in a very large bowl with a loose lid (so the carbon dioxide created by the yeast can escape), and refrigerate overnight, about 8-12 hours. Punch down the dough and shape immediately into loaves. Let the loaves rise for at least 60 minutes, until they have come to room temperature and have risen enough to reach past the top of the pan. Then bake as instructed.
How to store homemade bread
The key to keeping leftover bread good is to prevent it from drying out. Keep it in a well-sealed ziplock bag or tupperware, and it should last up to 2 days at room temperature. Because there are no preservatives in homemade bread, it will not last as long on your counter as store bought sandwich bread. Mold on homemade bread is shocking and incredibly offensive after all that work, like for real, so don’t let this happen to you! You can put it in the refrigerator to help it last longer (6-7 days), but I don’t like to do this; the fridge dries out bread because of the air constantly circulating. Instead, pop it in the freezer! ↓
Can you freeze white bread?
Yes! Homemade bread is SO easy to freeze and use later! And you get great results. I freeze ANY bread that I’m not planning to eat within about 12 hours. It freezes at exactly the freshness level of when you put it in the freezer, and it’s so easy to thaw. Make sure your bread is completely cool. Toss it in a gallon ziplock bag, get as much air out as you can, and toss it in. I love to use these 2 gallon ziplock bags and fit 2 loaves in. If you don’t have a ziplock, wrap once tightly in plastic wrap, then again in foil. This will help prevent freezer burn or frost build up on the bread. If you want to be extra safe, add one more layer of plastic wrap over the foil. If you really want to double the recipe, try a single batch the first time you make it and see how your mixer performs and if it takes up slightly less than half the bowl. If you feel confident after that, try a double batch! I have a 6 quart Kitchenaid and would not be able to double this recipe. If you have a 12-cup capacity Bosch mixer or similar, go for it.
Can you halve this recipe?
Yes! It’s so easy. You can make half the recipe and bake in one 9×5 inch loaf pan. All instructions are the same. Here are the measurements you need, it’s repeated in the recipe card notes too:
1 and 1/3 cups warm water 1 tablespoon instant yeast 3 tablespoons sugar 1 and 1/2 tablespoons olive oil 1/4 cup vital wheat gluten 3 and 1/2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt 3 cups bread flour, plus 2-3 tablespoons
Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram Show me pics of your bread on Instagram, I’d love to see them! @thefoodcharlatan Also I made the pomegranate jelly you see in the photos with my mom on one of the days I tested this bread, you can see our shenanigans here! She’s the cutest!
