Bread!!

I have NEVER made plain bread before, i’ve made banana bread tons of time but never a plain yeast bread so I wanted to try it. I looked at several recipes for bread online but decided to use a sandwich bread recipe from King Arthur baking. I generally trust their stuff because they have baking mixes that are gluten free and dairy free, though not all their mixes are gluten free so do pay attention.

to start the actual recipe we started with preparing the active dry yeast the way it says to activate it on the package as that required ten minutes to start activating. then we weighed our flour, and combined the rest of our ingredients

what I learned is I do not like the smell of yeast while I was mixing the rest of the ingredients together before the yeast I could smell it and it was not what I wanted to smell. Ryan was associating the smell with his mom cooking bread when he was a kid I was associating it with beer and I hate beer. but once the yeast was activated we added it into the dough and mixed it.

after mixing we proofed the bread for 60 minutes at room temp and it pretty much doubled in size already. after the first proofing we transferred it to the loaf pan we were using and let it proof again for an hour.

towards the end of the proofing time we preheated the oven to 350 degrees. after the whole hour it Was supposed to be higher than the top of the loaf pan but we used a really deep loaf pan so it came like right to the top, and then into the oven it went for 30 minutes. after the 30 minutes I really wanted to make sure the bread was actually done and didn’t just look done so we did another five minutes with tin foil over the top so it didn't get tooooo golden brown. after that we took it out let it cool slightly to remove it from the loaf pan then let it cool completely. it doesn’t LOOK great but we reserve judgment until after the taste.

now at this point in the process I knew it needed a long time to cook and because of the schedule I keep I was really tired so I went to nap, when it cooled completely my fiancé woke me up to try the bread and it was good but I went back to sleep an hour and a half to two hours later he’s bursting into our room going “please wake up and eat some of this bread i’ve already eaten half the loaf and I want to eat more but I want to make sure you have some.” so I would say the bread was a success, I don’t know how well it would keep for a slightly extended time because it lasted like three days at our place.