Delicious Homemade Bread in 10 Minutes

How we used to do it:

My mom always bought our bread when I was young, usually white (the kind that has all the nutrients bleached out), the cheapest in the aisle. I felt sorry for the children who came to school with homemade bread sandwiches. Boughten bread, as we called it, was so much better. Boughten bread was super soft when it first came out of the bag, perfect for making butter sandwiches–you just spread the butter and folded it over–and perfect for squishing into little round bread balls, which were delightful to make and not quite so delightful to eat.

Homemade bread, when the other children brought it, looked thick and heavy, whether they had peanut butter and jelly or deer baloney hidden inside.

Occasionally, when Mom wasn’t overwhelmed with babies and housework, she would spend an hour or two mixing and kneading and forming dough, and when she had finished, we would have a treat: cinnamon rolls or dinner buns or delicious warm bread with butter and honey. Unmindful of her children’s preference for all things bleached and artificial, she would have liked to make bread more often, if only she’d had time.

Our discovery:

Somewhere along the way, Mom got a bread machine as a Christmas present. We found that bread baked in the machine wasn’t very appetizing. It came out in a crusty rectangular cube, with a jagged hole in the center where you’d torn it from the little mixing thing-a-ma-jig.

But there was an alternative. If, instead of actually baking the bread in the machine, you set it on the dough-only cycle, when the cycle had finished you could take fresh yeasty dough from the machine, form it into loaves, and after half an hour of additional rising time, pop the bread into the oven.

Prep steps (10 minutes of prep time)

Put ingredients into the bread machine and turn it on, making sure it is set on dough-only cycle. (5 minutes)

When cycle has finished, take ingredients from the machine and form into loaves or dinner rolls. (5 minutes)

After dough has risen, bake at 350 degrees for 15 or 20 minutes, take from the oven, slice and eat. Delicious!

How we do it now: 

Almost every morning, Dad or Mom put ingredients into the bread machine before going out to the barn. Whoever’s around the house, alerted by the beep of the machine, is responsible to make the loaves.

When the loaves come out of the oven, baked just right (the small bread pans bake them more evenly than the large) they are soft, springy, and full of flavor, everything that bread should be. Nowadays, whether toasted or made into sandwiches or spread with butter and honey just out of the oven, I would never trade our good homemade bread for store-bought.

If you prefer homemade bread but are too busy or don’t know how to make it, try this simple solution.

The Basic Recipe

1 cup water

2 tablespoons margarine or butter, softened

1 egg

3 1/4 cups high gluten bread flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons yeast

Tips: Add all ingredients in the order listed. You can substitute regular flour for the high gluten, but the high gluten, or bread flour, gives a much nicer texture. For a glistening loaf, rub butter across the top when you take it from the oven.

You can often find used bread machines at garage sales and thrift shops for only a couple of dollars.

For a variety of recipes, google “bread machine recipes.”

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Just curious: How do the rest of you do bread?