Recipes for Beginner Bread Makers

Dear The Practical Kitchen,

I'm a beginner baker and have been wanting to learn how to make bread for a while now, but I'm just not sure where to start. There's so many different kinds of flours, tools, recipes, strong opinions as to whether you should use yeast and sourdough, what seems to be lots of math and percentages, and my head is spinning. What are your favorite recipes for a beginner baker?

— Where Do I Begin?

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Dear WDIB,

Before I give you some of my favorite recipes and some basic tools, let me give you the same speech I give anyone who tells me they're just too intimidated to try making bread: People have been successfully making bread without fancy equipment and special flours for literally thousands of years. Okay, sure, there was that one time the Jews fled Egypt and their bread failed spectacularly, but even they found a way to style it out into matzah.

What I'm trying to say is: YOU GOT THIS.

Those people you see obsessing over dough temperature and percentages and fancy flours are trying to achieve very specific, very precise results. You? You just want to make a nice first loaf of bread. You're a beginner baker. So don't start by chasing perfection — half the fun is honing your skills as you go.

You don't need a lot of fancy equipment, but there are some tools that will make your beginner baker journey a lot easier if you have them at the start:

• Kitchen Scale: When you're just starting out, using volumetric measurements (cups, teaspoons, etc) will yield acceptable results. However, the reason most bakers use kitchen scales is because a one cup scoop of flour can contain as little as 120 grams of loosely packed flour or as much as 220 grams of flour if you pack it in tightly. When you measure ingredients by weight, you remove any room for error. If you don't want to invest in a scale just yet, the best advice I can give you is just not to pack your flour into the measuring cup. You will end up with dense, dry bread.
• Dutch Oven: While not strictly necessary for all of the recipes below, baking bread in a pre-heated dutch oven helps contain the steam released from the dough as it bakes and results in a crunchier crust. Dutch ovens are also great for making soups, stews, and deep frying — so you know, justify the cost to yourself that way.
• Parchment Paper: You can use this to line a baking sheet or to pick up your shaped loaf and easily drop it into a hot Dutch Oven without burning your hands. If you don't have parchment paper, you can always just use some PAM or sprinkle some cornmeal on the bottom of a sheet tray before putting your dough down.
• Bowl Scraper: A plastic bowl scraper is great for helping mix and combine your dough, as well as scraping it out of the bowl once it's risen. You could use a spatula for this, but spatulas aren't quite as sturdy for scooping a whole batch of dough at once the way bowl scrapers are.
• Instant or Active Dry Yeast: It turns out they're the same thing! I know! The difference between them is that active dry yeast has a little protective shell around each granule and benefits from being proofed (mixed) with a bit of warm water before you use it. If you accidentally skip this step, the active dry yeast will still work, your dough will just take longer to rise because that little shell has to dissolve before the yeast can really get to work. I prefer instant yeast because you don't need to go through the extra step of proofing your yeast in water before using it. Just mix it right in with your dry ingredients (away from any salt) and proceed as usual. Store it in the freezer and it will stay good for a year or more.

What about Sourdough? I never recommend starting your bread making journey with sourdough. Sourdough requires cultivating and feeding a sourdough starter — a mixture of fermented flour and water that produces its own natural yeast — and even the most basic loaf takes three days to make. Start with yeast doughs, and once you build up your confidence working with dough and are ready to invest a bigger time commitment in your bread making, ask a friend to give you some of their starter. But don't start there.

So, now that you have your equipment and know a bit about why you should measure by weight and why yeast is not as complicated to work with as you thought, and why you should definitely not start with sourdough, here's some recipes to get you started:

Good luck, and happy baking!

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