This absolutely does NOT feel like a lazy recipe but I don’t have another cooking tag so this stays here. Deal with it.

Introduction: Traditional White Bread

Everyone’s been baking since quarantine started. I felt like I had to work my way up to something fancy so I started with traditional white bread.

Who doesn’t love some traditional white bread? It’s inoffensive, it’s plain and sweet, it’s great with almost any breakfast. And you know how I love a good breakfast.

There are only a few ingredients needed to make white bread. I’m a true fan of Gardenia enriched white bread, which is truly good enough to eat on its own. Let’s see how I measured up. Spoiler alert: not that well. Lol.

Ingredients for Homemade Bread

I’ll have to remember this in case I ever have to make bread without a recipe. It’s really just combine, proof, then bake.

• 1 cup warm water
• 1/4 cup white sugar – We FINALLY have white sugar in our house, people! Congratulations to us.
• 3/4 tbsp instant dry yeast
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 cup vegetable oil
• 2 1/2 to 3 cups all-purpose flour

White Bread Recipe

Prep time: 15 minutes

Proof time: 90 minutes

Baking time: 30-40 minutes

Total time: around 2 1/2 hours

1. Dissolve the sugar in warm water. Stir in yeast. Give it 5-10 minutes to activate.
2. Add in the salt and vegetable oil.
3. Mix in all-purpose flour, one cup at a time.
4. Knead dough for 7-10 minutes. I got to use the dough hooks of our stand mixer. Yay!
5. Place dough in a well-oiled bowl, and turn to coat. I think I forgot to turn to coat, lol.
6. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Allow to rise until doubled in bulk. You can also use a damp cloth to cover bowl. It took mine around 45 minutes to double up. It’s really cute.
7. Punch dough down. Knead for 1 minute. DO NOT PUNCH IT TOO MUCH. I think I overdid it and ended up taking out a lot of air, leading to a slightly dense bread.
8. Shape into a loaf and place into a loaf pan. This is an ideal step. Totally did not do this. I don’t even have a loaf pan; I just used the tray that comes with our oven…
9. Allow to rise for another 30 minutes. Theoretically this is so that the dough rises 1 inch above the loaf pan. Mine just got bigger in all directions.
10. Bake at 175 degrees C for 30-40 minutes. Since our oven is t i n y , the top burnt pretty easily. I should have divided the big loaf into two small ones to prevent the burning at the top. EDIT: On my next try, I divided the loaf into smaller ones and baked it for only 20-30 minutes. It turned out pretty good.
11. Enjoy with butter, or with your favorite dip!

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I owe a BIG THANK YOU to the blog Butter with a Side of Bread. Their “Easy Homemade Bread Recipe” post basically helped me troubleshoot every other minute.

My family loved the bread! It was soft and tasty in the middle. If you ignore all the burnt bits, it was basically perfect!

I’ll definitely try baking another type of bread, now that I’m a bit more confident with using the oven.

Until next time!

❤️ Your resident kitchen gremlin, now a baker (kinda)

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