Anybody have a nice, simple recipe as I don't really know any good recipes (I could google but thought I'd see if anyone here has any cool recipes). Don't have a bread machine so can't do anything that needs one!

I find that a mix of 1/3 Wholemeal and 2/3 white, with a handful of mixed seeds goes down a treat. I use extra virgin olive oil instead of sugar, with dried yeast and some decent salt. Yum….

Bread is pretty simple really, and TBH, the less you 'eff about with it the better. sugar, salt, yeast, bit of butter/lard/fat, some water (maybe a splash of milk, but it's not compulsory), and most importantly good strong flour. Proving is everything. Get a simple white loaf that you can do time and again before adding seeds and whatnot.

Spelt is the work of the devil.

i make a kind of moroccany flat bread that you can grill. 8oz flour, 5g yeast, 400ml warm water, 2 tablespoons olive oil. good pinch of salt. mix it all like buggery, cover the bowl, leave it to rise to double the size, flatten, leave to rise again, then make a few flat plods, and grill for a fair lock of minutes each side, till its nicely tanned. sorted. (all written with mockney accent)

Cheers guys, the flat bread sounds interesting 🙂

I've baked all the bread in our house for years now and IME this is the most reliable, easy 10 minute process!

Easiest bread to start with is a plain white loaf using dried yeast – get a jug of warm water, get a big mixing bowl and fill it with 7g of yeast (or however much one of the wee sachets contains), 6g of salt and about 650g of strong white bread flour. (I use organic untreated flour from Shipton Mill, but bog-standard supermarket flour works just as well).

Switch on the oven at its lowest setting for a few minutes then switch off (or if you have a warm airing cupboard in the house don't bother).

Get your kneading surface (a kitchen worktop) clean and bone-dry.

Combine the dry ingredients together by swirling your hand round in the bowl. Make a well in the centre of the bowl by taking the fingers of one hand and mixing in a circle outwards from the centre of the bowl.

Now pour some water into the well you've made in the centre. Sorry, I don't measure the water – you want it to be wet but not flooded, remember you can always add more. Using the straightened fingers of one hand, mix in a slow circular motion from the centre of the bowl outwards. The dough will stick to your fingers, but don't worry about it just now. Keep mixing in a circle and slowly adding more water until the flour has absorbed the water and is beginning to bind into a single mass. If you've loads of dry flour left, you need more water. If you've no dry flour and the fledgling dough is wet, you need more flour. Takes a few minutes, but you should end up with a single mass of dough that's a bit sticky but comes away from the bowl when you move it.

Using your clean hand, use the back of a small knife to remove the sticky dough from your mixing hand. Keep the dry flour handy.

Sprinkle some dry flour onto your kneading surface and tip the dough out of the bowl. Roll your sleeves up, flour both hands and start the kneading. This begins with gently moving the dough around and scattering dry flour over the top until it stops sticking to your hands and kneading surface and stays together (while retaining a bit of stickiness). If you can press down on it and move it around without it sticking to everything, you're ready to knead.

Do this by pressing down with the heels of both hands, then use one to stretch the dough away from yourself. Then take the other hand to fold the dough back on itself and repeat. What you're doing here is getting air into it and breaking down lumps of flour, so it looks as though you're tearing the dough but it'll start to feel smoother after a few minutes. On average, I give it about 6-8 mins of kneading, starting gently and getting more energetic as the dough becomes more pliant. Don't do it for too long, or it'll start to dry out.

Once it feels nice and springy and uniform in texture, massage it about into a ball, then roll it in dry flour.

Take a tea-towel, put it over the mixing bowl and liberally scatter dry flour onto it. Place the ball of dough onto the tea towel (into the bowl) and scatter flour on top. Loosely fold the tea towel over the dough and put the bowl in the warmed oven (or airing cupboard) for a 45-minute prove.

I usually bake after the first prove, but the dough will always benefit from a second prove. If you want to bake now, get the oven as hot as it will go and give it 5 mins to reach a decent temperature. I use a pizza stone to bake on, but a normal flat baking tray will do, just sprinkle flour on it and get it hot.

Take the dough out of the bowl – it should have grown. This is the yeast reacting with the other ingredients and releasing carbon dioxide, which stretches the gluten fibres in the dough (or something like that!)

Knock the air out of the dough by gently punching it, but don't repeat the stretching action of the kneading. It needs care here!

If you want to prove it a second time, shape it back into a ball and return it to the tea-towel and bowl and put it back in the warm place.

If you want to bake, carefully shape the loaf into a sort of oval cigar shape. Take a big sharp knife and quickly slash the top of the dough. When its baking, the dough expands and these slashes let it expand while keeping its shape.

Carefully place your loaf onto your tray or stone and stick it in the oven. My oven's electric and gets plenty hot (just shy of 250 degrees c) so I give a loaf of this size 31 minutes – how long you give it depends on your oven. If you're not sure, you can remove the loaf after about 25 mins and tap the bottom. Once it sounds hollow, the bread's done – the longer you leave it, the crisper the crust will get. Sometimes I like a good, well-fired crust!

And that's it – leave the loaf to cool on a wire baking rack (or a grill tray) then eat it. This is real bread, with no shite in it, so it won't stay fresh for long. Definitely best eaten within 24 hours, but it'll toast nicely for a day another 24.

Sounds like a lot, but isn't really – its about 10 minutes of actual work, the rest of the time the dough's proving or baking and you're just enjoying the smell!

Buy yourself a breadmaker. The best is Panasonic and only about £80. Takes about 4 mins to sling everything in and you can set it up to 13 hours in advance.

be careful buying a breadmaker – I dont know anyone (me included) that didnt put on at least 5kgs as a result!

Yup, I have the Panasonic. Put it on timer before you go to bed, and wake up to the smell of fresh bread baking. Lovely.

Don't forget to keep a space in the special cupboard for used twice electrical appliances

I've got a Panasonic too. Forget the recipes in the box and go for the loaves in a book called Fresh Bread In The Morning – it's about £3 on Amazon. The simple loaf is simple – flour, water, salt and yeast – with none of the Panasonic complexity of adding milk powder or butter. Better tasting bread at the end of it.

I've also been making stuff by hand – the New York Times No Knead Bread recipe is as simple as it gets and tastes fantastic. See here for the original recipe, here for an even easier one that takes very little effort, and videos of both hereand here.
HTH.

The simple loaf is simple – flour, water, salt and yeast

Do you have the recipe? I wouldn't mind trying it.

I've got a Panasonic too. Worth the money. We've not bought a loaf of bread since we got it 18 months ago. It's used everyday.

If you don't get a bread maker then Nigel Slater's recipe is good.

Thanks for the info, definitely can't afford a bread maker though so I'll have to stick with the other recipes!

Forget the breadmaker, and buy a food mixer instead (the crusts on breadmaker breads are cack).

Easiest bread ever – I started this 3 months ago, and have only bought one loaf since, I make 2 loaves every 3 days. It works out great, I actually eat less bread, which can only be a good thing.

Bung 500g super strong bread flour, 1 sachet yeast, 1 tsp salt and 325 ml of warm water into your food mixer (I have a Magimix 4200, but any mixer with a dough hook will do).

Mix it for a minute or so, till it's a ball spinning round in mixer bowl

Cowp it into a bowl and cover with tea towel, leave to prove for 1 hour in airing cupboard.

Bring it out and onto a floured work surface, turn it over 3 or 4 times (on need to knead) then form into a ball and sit on top of a piece of baking paper (I put this onto a choping board on top of hob) and cover with the mixing bowl.

Wait another hour until it's huge again and heat your oven to it's hottest setting with your biggest lidded casserole dish inside.

Once roasting hot, remove dish and lid from oven, and lift dough (by the corners of the paper below) and pop inside casserole dish.

Put lid on and into oven for 15 mins. after 15 mins, remove from inside cass. dish and put back on shelf of oven for further 15 mins.

Remove and allow to cool. I cook 2 of these (it's just as easy and there's no extra mess) as I said every 3 days and we can't get enough of them. I use my 28cm Le Creuset casserole set, but I used to use a 3l pyrex one from tesco which cost 4 quid.

The process effectively steams and bakes at the same time, giving extra rising, whilst baking a lovely crispy crust.

Best bread ever, I never thought you could make your own bread as good as a shop bought loaf, but this pisses all over the top of the chemical shoite from the supermarkets.

the bread maker doesn't make a big enough loaf for my consumption, all gone before mrs timber has lunch, so I am mostly on shop sliced to control my consumption* and make a loaf last 2 days

*bit prone to inch and half slices

Matthewjb –

the basic ingredients are almost identical to nobeerinthefridge's recipe, which is itself the same as the NYT recipe I linked to above. And yes, nobeer's one makes a fantastic loaf! Try it alongside this one – same ingredients, very different outcomes. I tend to use the breadmaker because I can set it and forget it – the NYT recipe is too distracting when you work from home (as is the smell of it cooking – a loaf of that stuff never lasts more than half a day in our house).

500gm strong white bread flour
sachet of instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
350ml water

use the 4 hour setting, I tend to set for dark crust. I also put a couple of handfuls of seeds in, as it gives the bread better texture.

Thanks. That's quite a bit more yeast than my normal recipe. I'll give it a go at the weekend.

Yep, just flour, yeast, salt and water.

I use 600g flour (usually a mix of wholemeal and white)
400g of warm water (yes, weigh it!)
about a tsp of sea salt and similar amount of yeast

It's all temperature dependent so if you mix it all and knead it then realise you have to go out, just bung it in the fridge and that'll slow it down. Generally I do a 2hr first rise then shape then a 1hr prove but with experience you can tell when it's ready and sometimes it takes longer in the winter if the house is cold! Generally the longer the process the tastier the bread.

I use that mix for loaves and buns. Bake them in a hot oven, 200C fan, buns for about 12 mins, loaf for 35.

I can recommend the book 'Bread Matters' by Andrew Whitley(I think) for an explanation of what's going on and why mass produced bread is crap. It's probably £15 or so but cheaper than a breadmaker.

I've come up with a method that does away with two big problems with bread making – namely mess and effort.

The basic idea is that you make a very wet dough – so wet that you can work it with a strong whisk in a bowl. The mixture stays in the bowl with no hand kneading/floured surface etc. All you do is vigorously whisk until really stretchy (couple minutes max) and then just add more bread flour which you mix in with a fork. It doesn't matter that the proportion of flour added at the end has experienced no kneading because the gluten in the wet element has been very well worked already.

I also suggest you avoid almost all weighing – just use half a pint of tepid water (put some olive oil in it if you want) plus a couple teaspoons of salt and a measure of dried yeast (one of the sachets). Then add flour until you get first (wet and stretchy) and second (dough) stages.

After it has all risen up in the bowl just turn it on to floured baking sheet and sling it in very hot oven. Don't bother knocking it back or 'owt – more rustic that way.

As an aside, all no-knead methods miss out on a great feature of the conventional ways – you don't end up with really really clean hands and nails!