How to Bake Your Own Soft White Bread

My mum, who loved cooking and baking 

For the last three years my mother, who was an accomplished cook and superb baker, has been living on a highly restricted diet - colon cancer with all its concomitant misery, does that to you. It's hard when you have lived a life in which you have relished your food to being presented with a relatively bland and extremely limited selection of foods. 

The wonderful thing about baking and making your own, however, is that it is relatively easy to take out what is not digestible. So, for mum, our home-baked pizzas were a godsend; when you make your own dough you can ensure that everything complies with the recommended diet. In particular, even though she cannot eat tomatoes ordinarily, the home-made tomato paste uses a colender and sieve to ensure that no pips or skin make their way into the paste and hence was suitable. As a result, mum could eat my pizzas, though of course I would take up the ingredients to her house and make them there since pizza should be served hot from the oven.

The interesting thing about the pizza dough is that I have found it makes an excellent, very soft and nicely textured bread, so this too I have made for mum - and the kids thoroughly approve of it too. 

Soft white home-made bread 

Soft White Bread Recipe 

1 teaspoon sugar

1 sachet or 3 teaspoons of instant dried yeast (the sachet is 10 grams, 3 tsps = 9 grams), so a sachet will do.

375 grams white bread flour (3 cups) 

1 teaspoon salt

250 ml water (1 cup) 

2 Tablespoons olive oil

Pre-heat oven to 200 C (400 F, gas mark 6)  but you will turn it down to 180 C (360 F) after the first ten minutes in oven

Given my mum's inability to digest certain food-stuffs, I made the loaf entirely with white bread flour. However, even my family, who exhibit a distinct preference for white bread (I blame my children's father entirely for this, though they actually don't really like bread anyway - apart from the home-baked kind) is a mixture of 1 cup brown bread flour to 2 cups white flour. That ratio is more healthy, but still mostly "white" both visually and texturally. 

As with the pizza dough, the use of water in which a potato has been boiled does enhance the texture of the bread, but it is by no means essential. In our family, we always make mashed potatoes without salt in the water, and then freeze the remainder for use in making bread and pizza dough - it works like a charm. 

Using the dough hook attachment of your food mixer, until the dough hook starts to make lines in the dough - like this:

The bread dough is ready

Now the one thing that really impresses people who do not bake is when you add a little bit of this and a bit of that to the mixture. The reality is, you don't really want to add extra flour, but quite often, in the case of any dough - particularly if you are one of those who uses cups for measurements rather than weight - the dough will be too sticky. Sticky dough is not advocated. In such an instance, you must add a judicious amount of extra flour to the mixture. 

When adding flour, bear in mind that it takes a while for the flour to absorb all the liquids, so don't add too much. When in doubt, wait. 

The dough is ready when you are able to press your finger into the dough and it retains the indentation, but springs back from the depression slowly. 

Pressing your fingers into the elastic dough 

However, the real test of readiness is the fact that your fingers come out completely clean, that is, not coated at all in any sticky dough.

Bread dough should not adhere to your fingers - at all 

As with any dough, after gently kneading it if you are in a hurry (though I am a big advocate of a long, slow, cold rising of dough, and hence do not use even tepid water but cold water), you must leave it to rest - and rise. 

I do not advocate using plastic to wrap the dough in - there is nothing wrong with my grandmother's methodology of placing a slightly damp cloth over the bread, and then swaddling it in a larger towel to keep the cold draughts at bay. Yeast does not like cold draughts. If it is particularly draughty or cold in your kitchen, you can place the dough into the oven - and an oven light left burning in the oven will help it to rise if you are in a hurry. But try not to be in a hurry when making food - it takes all the joy out of it, really. Food isn't just fuel, but comfort and love and culture and tradition and family and joy and warmth and appreciation - and so much else besides. 

Dough left to rise under a damp cloth, swaddled in a towel 

Of course, once it has risen, the dough will look like this:

The same dough as above, now risen 

At this stage, you punch the dough down - well that's what they tell you to do, in reality, don't be a pugilist, but fold the dough over gently. Now place dough in a bread tin - which itself should be very slightly oiled, and leave it to rise a second time. Mum lives about an hour's drive from me, and I found that if I punched down the dough just as I left, by the time I got there the dough would be sufficiently risen again for popping into the oven - and my brother would pre-heat the oven accordingly. If the day is very hot and the bread is becoming very yeasty - exuberantly cascading itself down the sides of your tin, you can always fold it down again - and even again. In fact, many advocate letting it rise multiple times, as long as you never break the lovely long chains that are developing, which will make your bread all tough and unpalatable, but treat it with respect, as you should. 

Patterns cut into the bread are pretty but not necessary 

When done, it should be beautifully brown on the bottom; you know bread is done when you pop it out onto your one hand (gloved, of course) and then tap it firmly with the fingers of the other and it sounds hollow. It really does sound hollow when done. If it doesn't, pop the bread back into the oven again. It should bake for twenty to thirty minutes. 

Bottom of bread loaf

If you like the top of your bread to be more brown then, before you put it in the oven, quickly whisk up a whole egg, or even just the yolk, and lightly brush it on the top of the loaf to create a glaze. The bread will then be both more glossy and more brown.  

Top of bread loaf

The crumb was perfect:

White bread with a perfect crumb

Mum loved the bread. Then afterwards, since she is now bedridden and in pain, she really thought long and hard about what words she wanted to leave for her grandchildren. Being mum, she kept it short, simple and wholesome - much like the bread I had baked for her that day. 

Grandma's Life Lessons:

1. Be Honest.

2. Be Kind.

3. Have Good Manners.

4. Wash Your Hands.

She said these are good enough words to live by.