Homemade Bread

In response to the comment on my last post I thought I'd share my bread recipe and what I've learned about bread making.

I have a bread machine so this is all easy for me. I used to make bread occasionally by hand but now with the machine I make almost all of our bread. I bought my bread maker at a thrift store for $15 but I know you can get them way cheaper if you're on a mission and not in a hurry about it. When I got my machine it had no manual so I googled, "how to use a bread machine with no manual" and this is the wonderful article that told me everything I needed to know.

So here's my recipe, it's very basic. I altered it from one I got from a friend who got it online.

Sandwich Bread
1 cup water
1/3 cup soy milk
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 T sugar
2 T olive or coconut oil
4 cups flour (I mix 1/2 whole wheat and then 1/2 oat, spelt or white flour)
1 tsp. yeast

What I do is measure out the dry ingredients into gallon size zip top bags, 5 bags at a time (enough for a week). This way when I need to make bread all I have to do is measure the wet ingredients (put those in the bread machine first) and then pour in my pre-measured bag of dry ingredients. It makes it soooooo much easier than measuring every thing every time. By the way I put the yeast on the bottom of the bag, then the flour, then the salt and sugar. I do this because I read somewhere that salt can make the yeast go bad when they're stored together.

I know that this recipe contains sugar and lots of times white flour but I still feel that the nutritional value far surpasses that of store bought bread! So there you are...another episode of how I do what I do!

Hope all is well with you and yours!