Welcome Zadok! This forum is an amazing place with loads of knowledge. A couple of things I found really useful when getting started...
- A scale: really invaluable to getting started, I think. It's so much easier to weigh out ingredients to recreate conditions in certain recipes (ie, this 1000g of flour, 650g of water, 1tsp of yeast and salt takes 2 hours to rise in my 72f kitchen.)
- King Arthur Flours Bread Recipes were how I got started. No knead bread is a good starter I think, and makes bread you'd want to eat. Sort by popularity/reviews and go from there.
- I've always liked this video of Richard Bertinet from the book "Dough." I was never super in love with the recipes, but I like his method- how experiential it is. You are working the dough, feeling it in your hands, starting as a shaggy mess and turning supple. You use your senses to bake it vs "knead for 5 minutes, rise for an hour, blah blah blah." You make a lot of dough and you shape little lots of little small breads vs a huge boule, which is fun because you get to try a lot. You might make 2 rolls, a demi baguette, a batard and an epis from one large batch of that white dough, which as a beginner is really fun.
Ultimately I think the best way to learn bread is experience- bake a lot and eat your mistakes. Try lots of different things, try the same formula a bunch and hone it in. Post about it here and get feedback from the hive mind. Just bake, bake, bake!
Good for you, to want to bake better bread yourself! I want to pass along some reassurance, which is not to worry and obsess about specific details too much. Start with some basic, relatively simple bread, and keep making it (maybe with some variations) until you have gotten the feel of things.
Most of the details people write about aren't all that important. Learning to be consistent is, which is why weighing ingredients is worthwhile. You can bake a wonderful loaf with all purpose flour, whole wheat flour, instant yeast, active dry yeast, sourdough, a long fermentation, a short fermentation, a freestanding hearth loaf, a pan loaf, 450 deg F bake, 375 deg bake, and on and on. The process and experience are more important than the details of any one recipe.
Just find a simple starter recipe, and as you get familiar with it then vary it to see what happens, and then branch out to other similar breads. By then you will have gotten a good idea of how it all works and you can move on to something more complex.
For most bread recipes, a small change in something - say the amount of water - will only make a small change in the result. So don't worry. If you had trouble shaping a loaf in a particular way, never mind, the bread will still be delicious, and there are probably dozens of ways to shape that loaf that will work.
Should the dough double, what if it triples ... not to worry, it will all work out almost every time.
There are tricky or fussy breads, but save those until later. High-percentage of rye and laminated doughs are among them.
You can often use the same or nearly the same dough for making all kinds of things, such as pan loaves, "artisan" hearth loaves, English muffins, dinner rolls, and so on.
The best bread baking youtube channels for a beginner might as well be these
Kneading by hand is very exhausting and only achieves the initial stages of gluten development even after 25-30 min of hard work. A dedicated mixer capable of handling bread dough or a Cuisinart food processor would help.
The most important tool in bread baking is thermometer(s).
There are a lot of good books and good textbooks on bread baking, you would have to find authors that suit your preferences, it is very personal. King Arthur's baking books are excellent, great recipes, I baked from them, but they never became my favorites, for example. Good luck with that!
"Kneading by hand is very exhausting and only achieves the initial stages of gluten development even after 25-30 min of hard work."
Time will do most of this work for you if you let it. Once the liquid is incorporated into the flour so that there are no dry bits of flour, cover the dough and let it sit for half an hour (or 45 minutes, or an hour, the exact time is not important). Then kneading by hand will be easy, and only a few minutes will be needed for most breads.
For dough that will ferment for many hours, those hours also help to develop the gluten, so you need to work on it less at the start.
and don't want to get my hands dirty, a good mixer becomes my best friend, as it can fully develop dough within 30 minutes and provide me with immediate results.
"The most important tool in bread baking is thermometer(s)."
I find that the tool that gets used the most around my bread bench is the plastic pastry scraper. A meat thermometer is no doubt very important in a commercial bakery, but for standard kinds of breads that a beginner at home would be starting with, I never have gotten much benefit out of using a thermometer at any stage of the process. I'm talking about lean and enriched sandwich loaves, Dutch Oven loaves, "artisan" hearth breads (sourdough or not) made of mostly mixtures of various wheat flours, dinner rolls, bagels, English muffins, and the like.
It is helpful to poke a meat thermometer into a loaf when you think it's done baking to gauge the interior temperature - around 205 deg F - 210 deg F for most common breads - but one gets the process under control so quickly that it's soon unnecessary, and for beginner's breads it's not actually needed.
An oven thermometer can be a good thing to use to make sure your oven is at the temperature it claims. I use an infrared thermometer for that, but a cheap mechanical thermometer is fine, if you remember that the temperature will vary across the oven. The way the bread comes out is the best guide for adjusting the baking temperature:
- If the crust is too dark or burnt and the interior is correct or underbaked, the oven was too hot;
- If the crust is too pale and soft when the interior seems baked right, increase the temperature next time.
Now if you get into making gels, or trying to make very sour rye bread, that's a different matter. A thermometer will be nearly essential.
It's never too early to introduce a newbie, even someone who only bakes at home, to the importance of temperature control—an advanced concept and powerful technique in bread making.
Although it's been awhile since I've posted (been busy on other projects), I saw your post and thought I'd welcome you and offer my $0.02 as well.
Congratulations on making the decision to bake your own bread! Your Grandma sounds like a worthy inspiration, much as my grandparents were to me (my parents were born shortly before, and were raised during the Depression).
In addition to the excellent advice you've already received, there are a few salient points that are worthy of repeating. First, get yourself a decent kitchen scale and learn to measure by weight instead of by volume. This will allow you to more easily scale your recipes for the amount of dough you need.
Second, measuring by weight opens the door for you to learn Baker's Percentages, which IMO is crucial for perfecting new bread recipes, at least where balancing the ratio of flour to water is concerned.
Once you've become proficient at baking bread, you may eventually want to consider milling your own flour. There are bakers here who prefer to mill their own, and for a variety of reasons, flavor I suspect being a primary reason.
I am a devotee of self-sufficiency, and as such had vascillated for years on buying my own grain mill. That is, until the 2020 Panic where hordes cleared out not only the bread aisle but then also the baking aisle. That did it, and so I bought a GrainMaker 99. I chose the GM99 because it looked like the one most likely to survive WW3 and the coming Apocalypse, and still be ready to grind my morning Joe.
I then journied to our local Amish store to buy 200 lbs of wheat berries, most of which I still have. A friend who went with me remarked to the cashier that I had just purchased a grain mill and was there to buy wheat berries. The cashier smiled knowingly and said "once you've tasted bread made from freshly-milled flour, you'll never return to store-bought." She was right! Once I mastered baking with 100% Whole Wheat flour, I've never had any desire to buy store-bought bread.
As for economics, you mentioned paying $5 to $7 at Whole Foods for bread. I'm including a photo of my bread made from Hard Red Winter and which is still my favorite. That 9x6 loaf cost me $0.83 in ingredients to make -- and it was made from wheat berries that were not doused in glyphosate during harvest, plus retains the bran and germ where most of wheat's nutrition is contained.
So, welcome to TFL! And if you enventually want to try milling your own flour, know there's lots of people here who will be happy to mentor you.
Aside from a scale you have all you need. I suggest picking a simple recipe and making it repeatedly until you're happy with the results. Most of the learning is getting used to how a yeasted dough develops, how to handle it, and so forth: tactile, visual stuff. It's like any kind of cooking: practice makes perfect.
Don't worry about finding the optimal recipe or book right off the bat. It's a journey and you'll end up trying lots of different breads.
I really like ChainBaker on YouTube. Tons of videos with recipes, techniques, comparisons, etc. Mostly yeasted breads.
I also recommend the Bread Code.
Welcome Zadok! This forum is an amazing place with loads of knowledge. A couple of things I found really useful when getting started...
- A scale: really invaluable to getting started, I think. It's so much easier to weigh out ingredients to recreate conditions in certain recipes (ie, this 1000g of flour, 650g of water, 1tsp of yeast and salt takes 2 hours to rise in my 72f kitchen.)
- King Arthur Flours Bread Recipes were how I got started. No knead bread is a good starter I think, and makes bread you'd want to eat. Sort by popularity/reviews and go from there.
- I've always liked this video of Richard Bertinet from the book "Dough." I was never super in love with the recipes, but I like his method- how experiential it is. You are working the dough, feeling it in your hands, starting as a shaggy mess and turning supple. You use your senses to bake it vs "knead for 5 minutes, rise for an hour, blah blah blah." You make a lot of dough and you shape little lots of little small breads vs a huge boule, which is fun because you get to try a lot. You might make 2 rolls, a demi baguette, a batard and an epis from one large batch of that white dough, which as a beginner is really fun.
Ultimately I think the best way to learn bread is experience- bake a lot and eat your mistakes. Try lots of different things, try the same formula a bunch and hone it in. Post about it here and get feedback from the hive mind. Just bake, bake, bake!
Good for you, to want to bake better bread yourself! I want to pass along some reassurance, which is not to worry and obsess about specific details too much. Start with some basic, relatively simple bread, and keep making it (maybe with some variations) until you have gotten the feel of things.
Most of the details people write about aren't all that important. Learning to be consistent is, which is why weighing ingredients is worthwhile. You can bake a wonderful loaf with all purpose flour, whole wheat flour, instant yeast, active dry yeast, sourdough, a long fermentation, a short fermentation, a freestanding hearth loaf, a pan loaf, 450 deg F bake, 375 deg bake, and on and on. The process and experience are more important than the details of any one recipe.
Just find a simple starter recipe, and as you get familiar with it then vary it to see what happens, and then branch out to other similar breads. By then you will have gotten a good idea of how it all works and you can move on to something more complex.
For most bread recipes, a small change in something - say the amount of water - will only make a small change in the result. So don't worry. If you had trouble shaping a loaf in a particular way, never mind, the bread will still be delicious, and there are probably dozens of ways to shape that loaf that will work.
Should the dough double, what if it triples ... not to worry, it will all work out almost every time.
There are tricky or fussy breads, but save those until later. High-percentage of rye and laminated doughs are among them.
You can often use the same or nearly the same dough for making all kinds of things, such as pan loaves, "artisan" hearth loaves, English muffins, dinner rolls, and so on.
So enjoy a fun and stress-free baking journey!
Hi Zadok! Welcome to TFL!
The best bread baking youtube channels for a beginner might as well be these
Kneading by hand is very exhausting and only achieves the initial stages of gluten development even after 25-30 min of hard work. A dedicated mixer capable of handling bread dough or a Cuisinart food processor would help.
The most important tool in bread baking is thermometer(s).
There are a lot of good books and good textbooks on bread baking, you would have to find authors that suit your preferences, it is very personal. King Arthur's baking books are excellent, great recipes, I baked from them, but they never became my favorites, for example. Good luck with that!
"Kneading by hand is very exhausting and only achieves the initial stages of gluten development even after 25-30 min of hard work."
Time will do most of this work for you if you let it. Once the liquid is incorporated into the flour so that there are no dry bits of flour, cover the dough and let it sit for half an hour (or 45 minutes, or an hour, the exact time is not important). Then kneading by hand will be easy, and only a few minutes will be needed for most breads.
For dough that will ferment for many hours, those hours also help to develop the gluten, so you need to work on it less at the start.
I haven't used my mixer to make bread for years.
and don't want to get my hands dirty, a good mixer becomes my best friend, as it can fully develop dough within 30 minutes and provide me with immediate results.
Yippee
"The most important tool in bread baking is thermometer(s)."
I find that the tool that gets used the most around my bread bench is the plastic pastry scraper. A meat thermometer is no doubt very important in a commercial bakery, but for standard kinds of breads that a beginner at home would be starting with, I never have gotten much benefit out of using a thermometer at any stage of the process. I'm talking about lean and enriched sandwich loaves, Dutch Oven loaves, "artisan" hearth breads (sourdough or not) made of mostly mixtures of various wheat flours, dinner rolls, bagels, English muffins, and the like.
It is helpful to poke a meat thermometer into a loaf when you think it's done baking to gauge the interior temperature - around 205 deg F - 210 deg F for most common breads - but one gets the process under control so quickly that it's soon unnecessary, and for beginner's breads it's not actually needed.
An oven thermometer can be a good thing to use to make sure your oven is at the temperature it claims. I use an infrared thermometer for that, but a cheap mechanical thermometer is fine, if you remember that the temperature will vary across the oven. The way the bread comes out is the best guide for adjusting the baking temperature:
- If the crust is too dark or burnt and the interior is correct or underbaked, the oven was too hot;
- If the crust is too pale and soft when the interior seems baked right, increase the temperature next time.
Now if you get into making gels, or trying to make very sour rye bread, that's a different matter. A thermometer will be nearly essential.
It's never too early to introduce a newbie, even someone who only bakes at home, to the importance of temperature control—an advanced concept and powerful technique in bread making.
Yippee
Although it's been awhile since I've posted (been busy on other projects), I saw your post and thought I'd welcome you and offer my $0.02 as well.
Congratulations on making the decision to bake your own bread! Your Grandma sounds like a worthy inspiration, much as my grandparents were to me (my parents were born shortly before, and were raised during the Depression).
In addition to the excellent advice you've already received, there are a few salient points that are worthy of repeating. First, get yourself a decent kitchen scale and learn to measure by weight instead of by volume. This will allow you to more easily scale your recipes for the amount of dough you need.
Second, measuring by weight opens the door for you to learn Baker's Percentages, which IMO is crucial for perfecting new bread recipes, at least where balancing the ratio of flour to water is concerned.
Once you've become proficient at baking bread, you may eventually want to consider milling your own flour. There are bakers here who prefer to mill their own, and for a variety of reasons, flavor I suspect being a primary reason.
I am a devotee of self-sufficiency, and as such had vascillated for years on buying my own grain mill. That is, until the 2020 Panic where hordes cleared out not only the bread aisle but then also the baking aisle. That did it, and so I bought a GrainMaker 99. I chose the GM99 because it looked like the one most likely to survive WW3 and the coming Apocalypse, and still be ready to grind my morning Joe.
I then journied to our local Amish store to buy 200 lbs of wheat berries, most of which I still have. A friend who went with me remarked to the cashier that I had just purchased a grain mill and was there to buy wheat berries. The cashier smiled knowingly and said "once you've tasted bread made from freshly-milled flour, you'll never return to store-bought." She was right! Once I mastered baking with 100% Whole Wheat flour, I've never had any desire to buy store-bought bread.
As for economics, you mentioned paying $5 to $7 at Whole Foods for bread. I'm including a photo of my bread made from Hard Red Winter and which is still my favorite. That 9x6 loaf cost me $0.83 in ingredients to make -- and it was made from wheat berries that were not doused in glyphosate during harvest, plus retains the bran and germ where most of wheat's nutrition is contained.
So, welcome to TFL! And if you enventually want to try milling your own flour, know there's lots of people here who will be happy to mentor you.
For videos, Kirkwood's are good: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnKirkwoodProFoodHomemade/videos
King Arthur books are fine; Reinhart's _Bread Baker's Apprentice_ is a nice book aimed at beginners, with many different kinds of bread.
You might also look at: https://www.thefreshloaf.com/lessons/yourfirstloaf
Aside from a scale you have all you need. I suggest picking a simple recipe and making it repeatedly until you're happy with the results. Most of the learning is getting used to how a yeasted dough develops, how to handle it, and so forth: tactile, visual stuff. It's like any kind of cooking: practice makes perfect.
Don't worry about finding the optimal recipe or book right off the bat. It's a journey and you'll end up trying lots of different breads.
If you want a good white sandwich bread, the link takes you to a recipe that I first started with. I always got excellent result with this recipe.
https://www.melskitchencafe.com/perfect-white-sandwich-bread/