# making bread



## han_solo (Aug 31, 2014)

Today i made some bread for the 1st time. Is there a way to make it more like the size of store bought bread(height wise)? I have not ate it yet thanks


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## jwal10 (Jun 5, 2010)

Did it not raise enough? Need to let rise more in the pan before baking....James


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## han_solo (Aug 31, 2014)

I would say it is about 2 to 3 inches high. I let it sit for over 1 hr in the bowl and the baking pans


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## Forcast (Apr 15, 2014)

mine did the same thing........


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## Raeven (Oct 11, 2011)

There are so many variables that can cause these problems. 

Was the yeast past its 'use-by' date?

Was the water too hot or too cold, failing to activate the yeast?

Did you keep the dough out of a drafty area while it was rising?

Was the rising period long enough, or too long?

Was your oven temperature hot enough?

Any or all of these things can contribute to a loaf that doesn't rise properly when baked.

It would be helpful if you could post your recipe, and maybe we can give some pointers that will better figure out why the bread didn't come out the way you wanted. But here are some basics that will help assure success.

1. Make sure your yeast is fresh and that you're using the correct type for your recipe; e.g., active dry v. instant;

2. Make sure your water temperature is between 95F - 115F when proofing your yeast;

3. Don't add salt directly on top of water/yeast mixture, as this can kill the yeast in your loaf;

4. Knead the dough sufficiently if the recipe calls for kneading (some recipes are no-knead, of course);

5. For the rise periods, make sure the dough is kept from drafts, is well covered and the top is not allowed to dry out. All these things can inhibit proper rise during baking.

6. Don't forget to slash your loaves before baking. This allows for better oven spring.

7. Make sure to preheat your oven to a high temperature to bake. The first ten minutes of baking contributes to the dough undergoing "oven spring." This describes how high the bread springs up from the hot oven temperatures. If baking with richer ingredients like eggs and butter, then you may want to lower the oven temperature after the initial 10-minute baking period. If your recipe is more lean, meaning just the basics of flour, yeast, water and salt, then baking temperature should stay between 400F - 425F for the duration of the baking period.

Bread making is as much of an art as it is a learned skill. Keep at it! You'll get the hang of it.  Good luck!


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## Bellyman (Jul 6, 2013)

I would also like to hear more about your recipe and what you did. There are a lot of variables. 

Just as one example, when I first started out to make bread, I used too big of a pan for the size loaf I was intending to make. It never did fill the pan no matter how long I let it rise. Once I got the right amount of dough in the right sized pan, it turned into a more normal looking loaf. 

There are lots of recipes out there that can make some pretty good bread. Some have only one rise, some 3 or 4. Some use a hotter oven, some not as hot. Some use longer baking times, some shorter. Some proof the yeast ahead of time and others just dump it into the mix. 

It's all kind of a big balancing act.


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## han_solo (Aug 31, 2014)

Thanks. The yeast i bought Sunday the same day i fixed the bread. I used 5 cups of flour(all i had) and i let it sit for over a hr and the oven was hot bc before i fixed the bread i fixed sausage balls. I will do the recipe tomorrow i dont have it with me


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## Bellyman (Jul 6, 2013)

5 cups of flour should have made a pretty large loaf, something around a 2 pound (or a little more?) loaf. My current recipe uses about 19 cups of flour for four large loaves of bread. I never measured them but they're close to 6" tall at their peak.

Also, what kind of flour did you use? Packages from the grocery store don't always tell you what kind of wheat is in it but I've seen packages marked as "bread flour" that were 100% hard red wheat. Great flavor, but that kind of wheat makes for a rather dense loaf that doesn't rise as well as when, say, some hard white wheat flour is added. Hard white wheat doesn't have as much flavor to it as the hard red but the loaves will rise higher and have a lighter texture. (I grind my own and typically use a ratio of 1 part hard red wheat to 2 parts hard white. But that's just what I do. There are many other ways to make good bread, and with different kinds of wheat/flour.)

I will be curious to see how the other ingredients were measured out.


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## jurlcrank (Jul 10, 2009)

I think you've been given some grand advice here. I make most all of our bread. I was wondering if the humidity level was high and if the temp was cool? On cool, damp days its takes bread longer. I've also learned, since we just moved from sea level to 3,000 ft above sea level, altitude makes it take longer. 

Let it double in the bowl and rise to the top of the pan before baking. Be patient and use good ingredients. There's always a learning curve with bread. Let us know how the next loaf turns out.


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## AnchorRanchFarm (Nov 17, 2016)

A great book on how to bake great bread is Peter Reinhardt's "Crust and Crumb". 

Store-bought breads have a very light and fluffy crumb (the inside of the bread loaf) because they have extra ingredients added to hold the shape of air bubbles made in the dough by yeast. You can approximate this with homemade bread but...don't expect it to be exactly like that chemical-laden garbage in bags at the store.

In addition to the other excellent advice presented above:

1) Proofing for an hour at room temperature is not nearly enough. As said above by jurlcrank and jwal10 it needs to double in size (which isn't going to happen in an hour.) Bakery bread is proofed, at kitchen temp, after mixing until it doubles in size (several hours), then punched down and lightly kneaded again, proofed overnight at cool temps (refrigerate), then in the morning brought up to kitchen temp so that it begins to rise...and then baked. Catching the dough at the right time so that it completes rising in the oven as it bakes...is an art.

2) To make a sandwich loaf (as opposed to a crustier, chewier French- or Italian- type bread formula), I would add a few T of wheat gluten to your flour. Bread flour is higher in gluten than AP but still doesn't have enough to really hold a tall loaf shape. Bake in a loaf pan, of course. Also higher gluten content will make the loaf chewy...you can mitigate this by adding dry milk powder. (For sandwich bread you want to be able to take clean bites so too much chewy is bad.) Adding a T or 2 (but not too much!) of butter or some other fat will also help hold the structure of air bubbles.

3) Yeast goes bad just like milk. It doesn't matter what day you bought the yeast, what matters is what is the use by date on the package. And keep it refrigerated until use, even if they don't do that at the store.

Don't give up...homemade bread is just incomparable to store bought. If you do it right, it's so much better the stuff in the store shouldn't be allowed to be called "bread". My own advice would be to start off with a French bread recipe and make a basic round loaf (boule). This is a lot simpler and it will be easier for you to figure out how to make really good bread this way. Tackle more advanced stuff like sandwich loaves (e.g. mimicking store bread) after you have done the basics.


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## Staceyy (Jun 16, 2007)

Professional bakers use dough enhancer to get bread to be lighter, higher and fluffier. You can buy some off of Amazon. I am a pastry chef.


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## Kittenkriss (May 1, 2017)

I'm new to the site and just came across this. I have recently been using a simple no-knead recipe I found online. We've stopped buying bread at the store completely now. This is great for sandwiches, dinners, toast...it's just an all around great recipe! It is a little time consuming (4 hrs to rise in bowl, then shape into loaf and rise another hour in the loaf pan before baking), but it's totally worth it. 
https://www.thespruce.com/no-knead-loaf-bread-3062236


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## MoBookworm1957 (Aug 24, 2015)

Staceyy said:


> Professional bakers use dough enhancer to get bread to be lighter, higher and fluffier. You can buy some off of Amazon. I am a pastry chef.


If you have a Mennonite store near by they will have it too.


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## krackin (Nov 2, 2014)

Oh fer cry sake. Bread is easy. 

Get a large stainless bowl. 4 C all purpose unbleached. 1 C of what you want, corn meal. oat meal, whole wheat. etc. Mix a bit and well the center, add 1 2/3 C warm water to the well. Keep 1/2 C water handy. Sprinkle 2 tsp salt on the flour around the bowl, then 2 T sugar. That is basic, add 1/4 C honey or molasses if you wish. Now sprinkle 2 good tsp yeast on the warm water in the bowl and wait 5 min or so. Toss laundry in or take it out, plant beans or whatever. 

Grease up your bread pan with rendered lard. Get to the bowl and start turning the dry into the wet by hand. The dough should all collect and be soft. Start to knead by hand, After 50 kneads it should not be sticky, if is add flour. If not malleable soft add a touch of water. Knead 150 times pulling 1/4 into the center each time. 

350* for 35 minutes. I do at lest two loaves a week.


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## TexasAggie (Apr 24, 2010)

We no longer have wheat flour in our home but want to make some bread with our almond/coconut flour. Can we use any of our almond or coconut flour with sourdough starter? 



AnchorRanchFarm said:


> A great book on how to bake great bread is Peter Reinhardt's "Crust and Crumb".
> 
> Store-bought breads have a very light and fluffy crumb (the inside of the bread loaf) because they have extra ingredients added to hold the shape of air bubbles made in the dough by yeast. You can approximate this with homemade bread but...don't expect it to be exactly like that chemical-laden garbage in bags at the store.
> 
> ...


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

Honey/Molasses in Bread? Is that a cake or a dish? smile...
Does anyone here bake with Sourdough and not with industrial yeast?
Would like to exchange recepies and experience


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## MoBookworm1957 (Aug 24, 2015)

Meinecke said:


> Honey/Molasses in Bread? Is that a cake or a dish? smile...
> Does anyone here bake with Sourdough and not with industrial yeast?
> Would like to exchange recepies and experience


yep


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## Meinecke (Jun 30, 2017)

@MoBookworm1957 Oh great...in case you mean the Sourdough part...smile
Just for interest...how long do you already bake with Sourdough and no yeast?!


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## MoBookworm1957 (Aug 24, 2015)

han_solo said:


> Thanks. The yeast i bought Sunday the same day i fixed the bread. I used 5 cups of flour(all i had) and i let it sit for over a hr and the oven was hot bc before i fixed the bread i fixed sausage balls. I will do the recipe tomorrow i dont have it with me


Did you feed the yeast? I almost add tablespoon of honey or sugar to my yeast while its blooming.(fermenting).
Pan size could be wrong,for what you're making,humidity many variables in bread not rising


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## MoBookworm1957 (Aug 24, 2015)

Meinecke said:


> @MoBookworm1957 Oh great...in case you mean the Sourdough part...smile
> Just for interest...how long do you already bake with Sourdough and no yeast?!


I use Red Star yeast stored up side down in jar in cabinet.
It's what my great grandma did, but then again she stored baking powder upside down too.
She said it fluffed the yeast, baking powder so the bread was better.
She made bread all her life. She lived to be 99 years young.


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## AnchorRanchFarm (Nov 17, 2016)

TexasAggie said:


> We no longer have wheat flour in our home but want to make some bread with our almond/coconut flour. Can we use any of our almond or coconut flour with sourdough starter?


You can tell how often I check this...my wife has made (commercial, shelf-stable) gluten free bread mixes, and my recommendations is...buy one of those. It's not worth doing it yourself. You can do a lot with gluten-free flours that isn't "bread", and I recommend trying those (pancakes, biscuits, etc.)

Also in moderation and when you feel up to it do try Einhorn wheat flour or perhaps Kamut. The whole gluten allergy simply does not make sense, at least not with our present understanding of biology there's really no way so many people could suddenly develop a gluten allergy in one generation. It's far more likely that the Frankenstein Winter Wheat that is ubiquitous in flours today (and admittedly Norman Borlaug's invention has saved billions of people from starvation, so it's hard to condemn it outright) has some weird characteristics to its proteins that don't set will with many people. So try some ancient grains and see if that helps.


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## AnchorRanchFarm (Nov 17, 2016)

Meinecke said:


> Honey/Molasses in Bread? Is that a cake or a dish? smile...
> Does anyone here bake with Sourdough and not with industrial yeast?
> Would like to exchange recepies and experience


I try to call sourdough "wild yeast". I bake with both. Commercial yeast is easier. I have enough farm chores, I don't really have time to feed a sourdough starter. I still build one every once in a while and keep it until I get tired of the work.

I feed wild yeast the flour it will be eating when it makes bread for me. If it can't live on that I don't want it.


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## krackin (Nov 2, 2014)

Same here with the sourdough. Keep it in the fridge. Night before kneading it (pun) pull out what you have to use, add a tsp or so of sugar. Keep it out all night then use it the next day as intended. It isn't as sour that way but plenty active, maybe toss in a tsp of yeast when making your bread. If you miss the day just feed it sugar again and leave it out, it will sour up better anyway. 

This is the first summer I have ever kept sourdough going and only because this method works so well for me. Usually I'll get a starter going in late Oct to early Nov.


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