Homemade Bread

One of life's greatest but simple pleasures has to be making and eating your own homemade bread. The basic ingredients are incredibly simple: flour, water, yeast and salt. And the process itself may seem daunting at first but with a bit of experience it becomes very easy and rewarding to make your own bread.

Yes, making your own bread takes some time, but most of that time is just waiting while you can do other things. The whole process of mixing your ingredients, kneading and shaping the dough takes about 15 minutes of labour. Letting the dough rise, twice in most cases, and baking it and then letting it rest takes up the majority of the time. As a rule of thumb, you can calculate that a basic bread loaf from start to finish takes about 2 hours. But the result you get is so worth waiting for those two quick hours to pass by. Fresh warm bread, made with good wholesome ingredients, just tastes outstanding and all you need is a bit of butter and perhaps some nice oil and good vinegar. When bread is so fresh it really doesn't need much else, actually serving it with really strong flavours or hearty dishes at this stage doesn't do it much justice. What you want is the moorish taste and texture of bread while it's still nice and warm. 

Of course almost always you won't end up eating your whole loaf of bread straight away, although quite often we end up eating about half! So storing your bread is very important if you want to enjoy its great taste and texture for a while. Homemade bread never really tends to go off as long as you store it in a place which isn't moist and completely airtight. In those cases you will find that bread, as many other things, will develop mould. And that is what you really don't want because then you can't use your bread anymore. We prefer to store my bread in a container or bread bin which lets in some air, and you should only put your bread in a container when it has completely cooled. In these conditions your bread won't get mouldy but it will gradually dry out, which is fine. The first 2-3 days your bread can still be enjoyed fresh but after that we like to just put a slice or two in the toaster and that makes the bread taste nice and crusty again, but not dry. This stage can last up to 2 weeks we find, but after this your bread will be very dry. But even completely dry bread can still be useful and processed into breadcrumbs, but it can also be used for a number of recipes such as French Toast, Italian Bread Soups etc. So even though baking your own bread might seem like a bit of a hassle at the start, there is really so much you can do with a loaf of bread and the taste and experience is just so different to its shop bought alternative. 

There is so much that can be said about good bread, about making it, about what ingredients to use and how to eat it and much more. We will regularly post tips and advice about all things bread on our blog that will hopefully be helpful and inspiring. And look out for our posts called 'Bread Experiment' on the blog as we will talk about our experiences using unusual and heritage grain flour for bread baking. Last but not least you can check out our YouTube videos to follow all kinds of bread recipes and show basic breadmaking techniques like kneading and shaping. All our recipe videos from TheCoolKitchen channel are available on our blog and you can subscribe to our channel on YouTube to receive notifications of new bread videos. 

We hope that these words have inspired you to start making your own tasty and beautiful loaves of bread.