What are your favorite bread recipes?

This Corgi bread looks really interesting.

Is he using a breadmaker or doing it all by hand, @JLeslie?

Challah bread braided, I don’t have the recipe book anymore but this one should be great.

@jca2 By hand. He prefers when the dough doesn’t need more than a few hours to rise. Overnight recipes he seems to not have the patience for.

Here’s my favourite – because when I want bread I want it now and without doing any actual work, but I also want it to be warm and fresh:

1) Mix up a pound of whole grain flour, a sachet of instant yeast, and two teaspoons of salt.

Optional: add any nuts, seeds, or spices you like. I’ve tried sesame, linseed, sunflower seeds, and oats. Sometimes I put in some designated bread spice mix with cilantro, fennel, and caraway.

2) Then, with a wooden spoon, stir in 2¼ cups of lukewarm water.

3) Done. No kneading. No rising. In a greased loaf pan, put your bread in the cold (!) oven. Set it to 350° Fahrenheit (170°C), take it out after an hour.

I’ve made this recipe about twenty times now, and it works really well. One trick: if you put a little dish of water in the oven with the bread, the humidity will form a really crunchy crust.

@JLeslie: At the beginning of the shutdown in spring 2020, a neighbor was giving out little jars of sourdough starter. Sourdough, as you may know, doesn’t require yeast so it was fairly easy. Not everyone likes sourdough bread. I love it.

I’ve made bread with a breadmaker, which was given to me about 15 years ago. It’s since made its way to the attic, since it took up a lot of cabinet space and I wasn’t using it too often.

An Italian woman I used to work for made the bread that has sausage inside it. It was sooo good.

I haven’t done much breadmaking, but my go-to sites for recipes are Epicurious, Chowhound and the NY Times.

@jca2 Unfortunately, neither my husband nor I like sourdough. We don’t mind using yeast though, we have good luck with it. Maybe living in a warm climate is helpful?