How to easily make homemade bread

Baking bread at home is one of the most enjoyable things in life. The whole process of kneading, shaping and baking is relaxing, stress-relieving and smooths out your complexion. I promise.

For this reason, because I want to convey to you how much it is worth making bread at home, I am going to tell you how to make homemade bread easily , because today we have lots of utensils that make all the stages of the process much easier for us.

Master Ibán Yarza, author of Pan Casero , always says that to make bread you only need three essential things :

• Flour,
• water and
• time, that is, some patience.

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

Making bread using a bread maker

If we want to start making bread , I think that a bread maker is the easiest way because it takes away your fears at the root. I started like this and I have used it a lot.

When one faces the baking process for the first time, one finds oneself a little lost and full of doubts:

• When is a dough well kneaded?
• How do I know if 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 do I set the oven to?

But the bread maker kneads for you, calculates the time needed to ferment the dough for you and also bakes it directly to offer you a finished product of very good quality.

A good bread maker comes with a recipe book, so you just have to put in the ingredients and program it to have the bread ready first thing in the morning or whenever you feel like it. Then it's up to you to go deeper into the process or not, as it suits you best.

An example of what you can achieve with a bread maker is this beautiful bread with candied fruit in a bread maker or the delicious and digestible cereal bread that we recently published. If you take a look at them you will see that making bread in a bread maker couldn't be easier.

Moulinex bread maker

Other utensils 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 discussed in the previous section, to carrying out all the stages by hand, in the most traditional way , as we explained in our article on basic kneading concepts and techniques .

Whatever method we use, there are many home baking utensils that make the task much easier, such as scrapers , bannetons for fermenting the formed bread, moulds and ceramic ovens. Even kneading robots are a huge help.

Ceramic ovens concentrate heat and maintain humidity to achieve an almost professional-grade crust on bread.

Accessories for making bread at home: "Pan Casero" book by Ibán Yarza , Emile Henry ceramic oven , banneton for fermenting bread and scraper .

We can use the bread maker only to knead and ferment , and take out the dough to bake it in a ceramic oven, like this semi-whole wheat bread , or use it to make a pizza on a baking tray specifically designed for it to be crispy and perfect.

We remind you that a cocotte can also be used to bake loaves in the oven with fantastic results, as we show in this bread made with old dough in a cocotte .

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