Our Best Bread Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What are 4 key things to remember when making bread? ›

Spices: Adding spices like cumin, coriander, or fennel seeds can give bread a unique and delicious taste. Cheese: Grated cheese, such as cheddar, can be added to the dough to make cheese bread. Seeds: Adding seeds like sunflower, pumpkin, or sesame seeds can add a nice crunch and flavor to bread.

Peasant bread is a loaf that is baked with the skill of a craftsman, the love of an artist, and the storytelling of a writer. In the past, peasant bread was made with what was available to the farmers who were considered poor. These farmers managed the whole process of growing wheat, milling flour, and baking bread.

Baguette. Baguettes are difficult to make because they require a precise balance of ingredients and technique. The dough must be mixed and kneaded properly to develop the gluten, and then shaped and scored correctly to achieve the iconic baguette shape and crust.

Potato Flakes or Potato Water

Starch helps the dough by trapping the gas from the yeast in the dough and makes the bubbles stronger. This helps the bread to rise and be lighter and fluffier.

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

Butter, technically a dough enrichment, tenderizes bread dough and limits gluten development, yielding a softer, more tender crumb and a richer flavor. The butter in this sourdough babka dough makes the interior tender—and delicious. Photo by Maurizio Leo.

Quickly proofed bread tastes like wheat flour. Because that's mostly what it is. But long rising bread has a chance for the yeasts (and bacteria, too, in the case of sourdough) to eat the starches and burp out all sorts of flavorful byproducts, in addition to the CO2 we rely on to leaven the bread.

In co*ckney rhyming slang “bread and honey” is shortened to bread, meaning money. The person who earns a wage to support their family is often referred to as the “breadwinner.” “Dough” came on to the American slang scene in about 1840, and predated “bread” by a little more than a century.

What is the old name for bread? ›

The Old English word for bread was hlaf (hlaifs in Gothic: modern English loaf), which appears to be the oldest Teutonic name.

A baguette is a French bread shaped like a long, thin loaf with a crisp and crunchy crust. A baguette is made of wheat flour, yeast, salt, and water. It is characterized by the crisp and crunchy crust but is soft inside. Baguette is widely known for its taste and texture; it is usually baked in a stone oven.

Bread is a baked product whose ingredients are flour, water, salt, and yeast. During bread making, biochemical and chemical-physical processes of changes occur, which affect various constituents. Water and flour are the main ingredients in a bread recipe and they affect texture and crumb the most.

ALWAYS REMEMBER WHEN MAKING ANY TYPE OF BREAD OR CAKE: Ingredients are proportional. Do not change ingredient amounts or product will not turn out correctly.