a safe and delicious first step into the world of bread!

Are you tired of the boring loaf pumped with additives from the next supermarket? Are you tired of running to the organic bakery to buy a decent loaf that will cost you half of your daily budget, but at the same time you really don’t want to spent an eternity in the kitchen getting your hands all sticky with bread dough? Then you’ve come to the right place! This loaf is super easy, very tasty and gives you a lot of room for your very own variations and ideas, discovering the world of baking. Once you’ve started you won’t be able to stop, and soon the taste of industrial bread will become merely a faint memory.

Ingredients

• 650 g flour
• 450 ml lukewarm water
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 42 g fresh yeast or 2 packs of dry yeast
• 2 tsp salt
• some seeds to sprinkle over (sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, poppy, etc.)

Flour, flour, flour

Flour is of course the most important ingredient, and that’s where you can be the most creative: follow your taste and test out different combinations! Let me just give you a few recommendations:

• Wholewheat or not wholewheat? both is the answer. Wholewheat gives you more nutrients and a deeper flavor, but the plain flour will allow your loaf to rise properly!
• Concerning wheat flour, I would never go lower than the type 550, the finer the flour the less fitted it is to bread making.
• Rye flour is delicious, but be careful: if you put more than one third rye flour in, your dough will get extremely sticky.
• Spelt flour is really nice, especially if you can find the type 1050: a good compromise between plain and wholewheat.

Recipe

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1. crumble the yeast in the water, pour in the sugar and mix. It is best to let it rest for 2-3 minutes.
2. In the meantime mix the flour with the salt in a big bowl.
3. Form a well in the flour, pour in the liquid and mix everything well. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can use a spatula. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes.
4. Cover the bowl with a lid or a kitchen towel and let the dough rise until it has roughly doubled in size. It takes around 45 minutes.
5. Knead the dough briefly and form a loaf. You can either put it in a loaf pan or on a baking paper covered tray.
6. Brush the dough with a wet brush and sprinkle the dough with seeds. Then brush it again so that the seeds get well incorporated in the dough.
7. here you have two options:
   – You can either put the dough in the cold oven directly, turn on the oven to 180°C and bake it for around 50 minutes.(It is possible that your dough won’t rise properly, but it is quicker that way!)
   – Or you can cover the dough again for 20-30 minutes, than put it in the preheated oven (180°C) for around 40-45 minutes.
8. You can check if your bread is done by tapping the underside of the loaf: if it sounds hollow, it’s done!