White Bread

I made bread! While this may seem glaringly obvious as I am posting about it but, never did I expect my first attempt to make bread actually turn out to be, well, bread. I’ve always heard that bread is really hard to make and assumed myself that it would be because it’s about technique rather than simply following a recipe but I did it! And I’m very proud of myself however crazy that may seem!

Someone I work with, Glen, told me that he made his own bread and so I asked him to give me a very simple, basic, potentially Kathryn-proof recipe for bread. And guess what? It worked! He said that the simplest bread to make was white bread and wholemeal is overall trickier because of the texture of it. My mum also said from experience that homemade wholemeal bread can turn out rather dense. Needless to say, I went with the white option but after a few more practices I think I’ll branch out a little more.

A key part about making bread is the kneading. I kneaded mine for about 10 minutes in total at two different stages in the process. The idea of kneading is to stretch out the dough (I’ve heard this activates the yeast but that would be a lie…). Somewhere along the line through watching various cooking programmes and reading recipe books I picked up a simple methodical kneading technique. Once you have the dough on a floured (very important!) surface I pull the dough towards me wit the knuckles of one hand and simultaneously push it away from me with the heel of my other hand. I then fold it in half give it a quarter turn and so it again and again and again until I’ve been doing it for 5minutes.

Whether this is the proper way to do it or not I have no idea but it seemed to work well for me as, I may have already mentioned this along the way but, I made bread!