How to Make Homemade Bread Easily

Making bread at home is one of the most pleasurable things in life. The whole process of kneading, shaping, and baking is relaxing; it takes away your stress and smooths your complexion. I promise you.

That's why, because I want to convey to you how worthwhile it is to bake bread at home, I'm telling you how to make homemade bread easily, well, these days we have plenty of tools that make all stages of the process much easier for us.

Master Ibán Yarza, author of Homemade Bread, always says that To make bread, you only need three things essentials:

• Flour,
• water and
• time, that is, a bit of patience.

Yes, it is required a little patience to wait for a dough to ferment properly, but not much more. And the ingredients can't be any cheaper, don't you think?

Make bread using a bread maker

If we want to get started in bread making, I think a bread machine is the easiest way because it takes the fear out of it completely. That's how I got started and I've used it a lot.

When you first face the bread-making process, you feel a bit lost and full of doubts:

• When is a dough properly kneaded?
• How do I know the dough is fermented?
• If it takes so long, when do I have to start the whole process?
• Am I shaping my bread correctly?
• What temperature should I set the oven to?

But the bread maker kneads for you, calculates the time needed to let the dough rise, and also bakes it directly to give you a finished, high-quality product.

A good bread maker It comes with a recipe book, so you just need to add the ingredients and set it to have the bread ready first thing in the morning or whenever you prefer. After that, it’s up to you whether to delve deeper into the process or not, whatever suits you best.

An example of what you can achieve with a bread maker is this beautiful Candied fruit bread in a bread maker or the delicious and digestive cereal bread that we published recently. If you browse through them you'll see that making bread in a bread maker couldn't be easier.

Moulinex Bread Maker

Other tools for making bread at home

To make bread at home you can use a variety of methods, from doing everything in a bread maker as we mentioned in the previous section, to carrying out all the stages by hand, from the most traditional way, as we told you in our article on kneading basics and techniques.

Whatever method we use, there is a lot utensils for home baking that make the task much easier for us, such as scrapers, bannetons to proof the shaped bread, molds and ceramic kilns. Even the stand mixers they are a tremendous help.

The ceramic kilns concentrate heat and retain moisture to achieve an almost professional-level crust on bread.

Accessories for making bread at home: Book "Pan Casero" by Ibán Yarza, Emile Henry ceramic oven, Banneton for proofing bread and scraper.

We can use the bread maker only for kneading and fermenting, and take out the dough to bake it with a ceramic oven, like this one semi-whole wheat bread, or use it to make a pizza in some baking tray on purpose so that it turns out crispy and perfect.

We remind you that a casserole it also works for baking loaves in the oven with fantastic results, as we show in this bread with old dough in a casserole.

I think that after this review of all the available utensils you have no excuse not to try making bread at home. We offer you, in addition to all the essential utensils, great books to get you started, such as We make bread, by Ibán Yarza and Alma Obregón.