Guest blogger (and working mum) Pernille Berg Larsen has a passion for baking bread. Here she explains how easy and quick it is to make your own bread – and why you should…
There is nothing better than the smell of freshly baked bread (I love to eat it just with pure butter). It is very satisfying and rewarding making bread and serving it to friends and family. However what they don’t know is how easy and quick it is to make a healthy loaf. You can even make 2 loaves of bread for under $1. There is no reason for NOT making bread.
Many people think making bread is complicated. However, the biggest problem is to just get started and to not be afraid of the process.
If you master making simple dough with plain flour, yeast, salt and water (ingredients you are likely to already have in your pantry) you will easily be able to make the fifty other bread recipes from my book “One Dough, Fifty Breads“.
The book helps you to discover how easy and rewarding baking bread can be. When you make your own, you will be able to serve healthier options for your family and find it’s even cheaper than buying mass-produced bread with lots of additives.
Basic Bread Dough
This dough can be turned into almost any kind of bread – wholegrain, rye, pizza, scrolls, buns, sausage buns, calzones, raisin toast, Italian bread, baguettes, flat bread, multi grain bread, turkish bread, naans, cinnamon loaf, swirls – you name it.
Ingredients:
- 2 ½ cups ( 600 mL) water
- 1 tbsp dry yeast
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 kg Kialla Organic Unbleached Plain Flour
Method:
1. Mix the yeast, salt and water in a large bowl.
2. Add 1 cup flour at a time and knead the dough for about 5 to 10 min.
3. Let it rise on the kitchen bench until the dough has doubled in size, which will take about 1 hour.
4. When dough has risen dust the kitchen bench with flour and place the dough on top.
Now the dough is ready to be shaped it into the kind of bread you wish to make.
You can start by making Italian Bread:
(the dough will make 2 loaves of bread)
1. Pre-heat the oven at 200°C.
2. Place baking paper on a baking tray.
3. Place the dough on the kitchen bench and pull it apart to make 2 loaves. Knead it a few times by folding it in thirds over and over and place each in a baking tray.
4. Dust the bread with flour or sesame seeds and score a shallow criss-cross pattern in the centre of dough.
Set aside for 30 min.
5. Bake for 25 to 35 min. or until light brown.
This might seem like a large amount of dough – but I always make that much. I do my weekly baking on the weekend, often on a Sunday afternoon with my kids. And probably 2/3 of it I freeze and use during the week. For example, I often put frozen pizza scrolls in my kids lunchbox in the morning and at lunch time they have defrosted and are ready to be eaten.
So you can see this is only the beginning of what can be made with this dough. For all the variety of breads, pizzas, buns, scrolls and more check out the book One Dough Fifty Breads.
About the author:
Pernille Berg Larsen lives by the mantra of keeping things simple. Author and teacher, she is passionate about spreading her message of how wholesome family food can be simple and fun to prepare.
This is the first in a series of Pernille’s posts on baking.
See her next post on how to make your own sourdough starter.
You can use either Kialla Organic Unbleached Plain Flour or Kialla Organic Bread and Pizza Flour for baking bread.
