A Loaf of Bread

In addition to being a novice bookbinder, I am an experimenter with bread.

I don’t actually eat a lot of bread. Somewhere along the way I got really picky about it, or outgrew it, or something. I like a slice of toast with peanut butter for breakfast, but oatmeal is great, too… or an egg sandwich. I don’t eat more than a couple of sandwiches every week, so unless I bake, it’s pretty rare to have a loaf of bread in the house. (Lots of naan and tortillas, though, so it’s not like we’re low carb.)

I like sandwich bread, because it’s good for toast. So I generally look for bread that can at least be modified to make a sandwich loaf.

It’s good to be aware of your actual intentions.

Do I want an amazing loaf of perfect artisanal bread?

No I do not.

(I mean, yes, I would like that very much. But that’s not my goal when baking bread.)

I want a sandwich loaf for toast. It’s quotidian, I know, but this heart knows what it wants… and it’s toast. With peanut butter. And jam.

Purists and expert bakers will have… feelings about how bread should (and does!) work. There are people who are very good at this sort of thing, who have worked for a long time to perfect their craft. If that’s your cuppa, you should definitely listen to what they have to say. (My nod to this expertise, borne from experience, is that I have an easier time baking if I weigh my flour and liquid. I’m wildly inconsistent when I do anything by volume. And I use a thermometer to check internal temperatures.)

But here’s the thing about baking bread: you don’t actually have to be great at it to get to a reasonable end product. Practice makes improvement, obviously, and following directions helps a lot. Knowing what you’re after is also helpful; an expert in high-hydration artisanal loaves might not have the answers you’re looking for if you want to make a piece of toast with peanut butter.

But you do not need the fanciest stand mixer, or the fanciest flour, or all the time in the world to create a reasonable loaf of bread. If you want a homemade loaf of bread, find a recipe that fits your time requirements and the kind of equipment you have or want to use, and give it a try.

I guarantee that whatever you make will taste great… at least as good as what you can get at the grocery store.

Here are a couple of my favorites right now:

Low-Knead Sandwich Bread (Kenji Lopez-Alt for The New York Times)

If you’re not interested in a long ferment, here’s a riff on Peter Reinhart’s Light Wheat Sandwich Loaf (which I converted to a white loaf because whole wheat flour doesn’t sit well in my gut), from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Light Wheat White Bread: a very basic, slightly enriched, recipe

• 18 oz bread flour
• 3 TBSP soy milk powder (or cow’s milk powder, if that works for you)
• 1.5 tsp kosher salt
• 1.5 tsp instant yeast
• 11 oz room temperature water

Mix together flour, soy milk powder, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add water and mix until combined. Move to bread board and knead for approximately 10 minutes (if you have a stand mixer and want to use it, kneading will take less time… this dough is dense, so know your mixer).

The resulting dough ball should be smooth, smell kind of yeast-y and bounce back slowly when pressed with your finger.

Place in lightly oiled bowl, cover, and let rise for ~ 90 minutes (until doubled in size). If your kitchen is cool (mine is for most of the year), you can put the dough in an improvised “proofer” … your microwave, or oven (turning on the light will warm the oven a little bit).

Take dough out of the bowl and work it into a log shape. (If you want a visual about how to do this, check out this post from The Perfect Loaf.)

Place in a lightly oiled 9″ x 5″ loaf pan, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 60 – 90 minutes, until the dough crests the rim of the pan. (Make sure to check it! This recipe uses quite a bit of yeast, and it gets very active, particularly if it’s warm.)

30 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 350°F. Bake risen dough for 30 – 40 minutes, rotating halfway through. Remove from pan within 5 minutes of removing from oven and let cool for at least an hour (more like two) before attempting to slice. Finished bread internal temperature should be 190°F, or should sound hollow when the bottom is tapped.

(We store our bread in the fridge — which is not great — because we occasionally have mice… which is common if, like us, you live with a parrot… or (also like us, when we lived in NYC) you live over a restaurant. If you don’t have a rodent issue, store at room temperature.)