Why Make Homemade Bread?

Baking bread at home is an incredibly sensual experience. There are many easy ways to produce those fragrant loaves with only a few ingredients. Freshly baked bread is so much better than the ready-made bread sitting on the grocery store shelves and can be more economical as well. Admittedly, bread from a bakery is delicious, but requires making a trip to the bakery to purchase. Also, it is so satisfying to be able to make something as basic as bread at home. It can be a fun way to involve children in food preparation.

Making bread requires three steps: Making the dough, proofing, and baking. Making bread dough is as easy as mixing together flour, liquid, yeast, and a few other basic ingredients depending on the variety of bread you are baking. There are four possible ways of mixing the dough.

A bread machine can be used to mix the dough, proof it (let it rise) and bake the bread. Using a bread machine is probably the easiest way to make homemade bread, but is also the most expensive because of the cost of the machine. A stand mixer with a dough hook is an easy way to mix dough and is something that may already be in the kitchen. Another commonly owned kitchen appliance that makes good dough is the food processer. Finally, bread dough can be made by hand.

Once the dough has been mixed and sufficiently kneaded, either by hand or machine, it just needs to be allowed to rise, and then baked. It really is a simple process. The mixing and kneading take only about fifteen minutes, and the bread baker is free to do other things while the dough is rising. Baking takes little time as well, about twenty to forty minutes, depending on what is being baked.

The best thing, other than the taste of homemade bread, is the fragrance. There is nothing like the smell of fresh bread as it is baking, and this wonderful smell fills the house. Making homemade bread requires little hands-on time, and the results are definitely worth the effort.