Bread Machine Multigrain Loaf Recipe. Gold Medal Better for Bread flour. Gold Medal whole wheat flour. Beginners Sourdough Bread the perfect loaf. My very first sourdough loaf surprisingly turned out to be pretty decent, but oh boy was it sour. Sour like those candies you really only eat at the movie theater because they destroy your tongue, sour. Loaf-of-Ruhlman-Sandwich-Bread.jpg' alt='Loaf Of Bread Recipe With Yeast' title='Loaf Of Bread Recipe With Yeast' />Make and share this One Loaf White Bread recipe from Genius Kitchen. This allpurpose bread recipe produces a crusty plain white loaf thats classic and delicious. The quantities given here yield two crusty hearth loaves with an open. Update If youre interested, Ive written an update on this technique here. What if I told you that instead of buying bakery bread for four or five dollars a loaf. Ok, maybe thats an exaggeration but I remember my wife choking down a slice commenting that it was pretty good, yeah, pretty good bread and only later did she fess up that it was actually not really that good to be honest. But all in all the bread baked fully, rose nicely and had a pretty decent crust. And you know what, we ate the entire thing because despite its sourness it still was tasty, and one has to start somewhere, right And starting out can be daunting, especially with sourdough, but thats what this post is about a beginners sourdough bread. A how to guide on getting started with baking my style of sourdough at home with a touch more explanation for some of the steps and terms. I vividly remember the weeks leading up to that first loaf weeks of voraciously reading Tartine Bread finally thinking that my newborn sourdough starter and I were finally ready to take on the sourdough world like a boss. Easy Loaf Of Bread RecipeDog eared pages, post it notes, bookmarks, torn pages and highlighted passages peppered the book that first kindled that baking spark. My notebook had a schedule scribbled down, surprisingly mostly the same schedule outline I follow today, with what to do when, and how to do it. Flour was purchased. Water was filtered. Kitchen towels were cleaned. And just like any good engineer I dove in head first and got my hands dirty. Fast forward a few bakes, a few a ha moments like dont use the entire levain made from the Tartine recipe, they make extra, and many breakfasts and dinners with fresh sourdough I found myself descending into a full baking obsession. There was something ancient about performing the whole process, something exciting about mixing together such simple and humble ingredients that would eventually produce beautiful life giving sustenance modern day alchemy. Its such a simple thing, really, and yet brings so much joy when family friends tear into a fresh baked loaf. I wanted to bake every day of every week. My original motivation for starting this site was to not only journal my baking progress but to pass on those things I learned along the way. Hokkaido Milk Loaf Very soft loaf bread which is very popular in Japan. It has a cottony and springy texture which can just melt in your mouth. Welcome to The Fresh Loaf, a community for amateur artisan bakers and bread enthusiasts A free site membership is required to post comments, share recipes, or create. When I first started baking there were only a handful of resources with step by step help for baking sourdough. Recently Ive come to realize that here at my very own site I dont have a beginners sourdough recipe, a recipe for those just starting out to get in and get their hands dirty. And so here we go if youre just starting out in the world of baking sourdough bread, this is a jumping off point a beginners sourdough bread. Bakers Terminology. Ill start off by briefly introducing some common bakers terms and their definitions, this will help us all have a common vocabulary and youll certainly run into these terms elsewhere. Starter. A starter is essentially a mix of flour and water that naturally ferments. The starter is fed indefinitely, and when bread is to be made a small amount of this starter is taken to create an off shoot, or leaven, that will eventually be used in making bread and cease to exist when baked in the oven. Levain or leavenMade with the starter, but only a small off shoot, the levain is what is built, or made, to provide the dough with a starting population of yeast and bacteria. Its an off shoot because the levain is eventually mixed into the dough when making bread, and has the same fate as the bread itself to be baked in the oven. The levain is always made with a portion of a starter when the starter is mature, or at its peak more on this later. Autolyse. Autolyse auto lease is a step in the baking process where only flour and water are mixed together, always at the beginning of the whole process. Not only does it initiate enzymatic activity in the dough which helps draw out sugars from the flour, but it also increases its extensibility the ability for the dough to stretch out without tearing. Increased extensibility up to a point is a good thing it allows the dough to expand and fill with gasses, resulting in a light  airy loaf. Bulk Fermentation. This is the first rise of the dough, as a single cohesive mass, which takes place after mixing the flour, salt and levain. The fermentation process during this step is critical and provides flavor to the dough in the form of alcohols  acids the starter and leaven also play a role here and also leavens the dough through gaseous carbon dioxide byproducts. Proof. The final rise, typically done at cooler temperatures for recipes here at my site, is where the divided and shaped dough continues to ferment, further strengthening the dough and leavening it. Final Dough Temperature FDTThe final dough temperature FDT1 is the temperature of the dough right after mixing all ingredients together. Naturally, each ingredient levain, the flour, the water and the ambient environment has a temperature and while most of these are out of our control, we can adjust the water temperature. Adjusting it enables us to change the FDT of the entire dough mass to meet whatever the recipe calls for. Lemon Bar there. In the following example we will determine what our water temperature needs to be to achieve a FDT of 7. F Ingredient. Measured Temperature. Levain. 75FFlour. FRoom Temperature. FWater. Temp FDT x 4 Levain. Temp Flour. Temp Ambient. Temp 2. Water. Temp 7. Water. Temp 9. 2FWe need to warm our water to 9. F so at the end of our mix our final dough temperature will be 7. F. For additional explanation see the Dough Temperatures Guide at King Arthurs website. Bakers Math. Bakers math, or bakers percentages, help bakers adjust the actual quantity of the ingredients up or down, depending on how much bread they have to make, while keeping all the ingredients at the same percentage with respect to each other. All of the formulae here on my site are expressed in bakers percentages where all ingredient weights are expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, which always adds up to 1. The best way to understand this is with an example. The formula for my typical levain is shown in the table below Weight. Ingredient. 25g. Mature liquid starter 1. Fresh Milled Hard Red Spring Wheat. H2. O room temperature. The flour is always expressed as 1. In this example to calculate the percentage of mature starter required 2. The full computed table as youll see it throughout my site Weight. Ingredient. Bakers Percentage. Mature liquid starter 1. Fresh Milled Hard Red Spring Wheat. H2. O room temperature. Creating a Sourdough Starter. It all starts with, naturally, your starter. The first thing we need to do is get a strong sourdough starter rising and falling predictably. If youve already done this we can proceed, if not I have an entire post dedicated to creating a sourdough starter. If youre wondering how I maintain my starter on a day to day basis have a look at my sourdough starter maintenance routine. This guide will show you what visual cues to look for to determine when your starter is ready for a refreshment feeding, when its gone a bit too far before refreshment, and lastly, when its at its peak and ready to be used for making a levain. Baking Tools. There are a few necessary tools to baking your first loaf of bread. This might look like a long list but many of these things you probably already have in your kitchen only buy what you dont have. One item is so necessary I have to draw attention to it upfront a kitchen scale. If you dont have a kitchen scale, please please consider buying one. You can use it not only for bread but for just about every other thing in your kitchen it pays for itself time and time again. Measuring flour with cups and scoops is wildly inaccurate.