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Monday, July 2, 2012

Classic White Bread

Simple and easy to do recipe for a perfect sandwich bread. The aroma coming out of the hot oven baking your bread is simply intoxicating and I just love it. Hope you enjoy the recipe as much as I loved baking it
Ingredients:
All purpose flour (Maida) - 3 cups
Water - 1 cup, luke warm
Milk - ½ cup, luke warm
Oil - ¼ cup
Active dry yeast - 2 tsp
Sugar - 2 ½ tsp
Salt - 2 tsp

Method:
In a bowl, add milk and water, dissolve the sugar and yeast in it. Leave the yeast mixture for around 10 mins. Whisk in the oil, add salt. Take flour in a large bowl, form a well in the middle, add the yeast mixture little by little, keep mixing the flour with the help of a fork. You can also use a hand blender with kneading attachment. If you feel the mixture is quite loose, cover it with a damp towel and leave it for couple of minutes before you start working on it again. Dust a flat surface with flour and knead the dough thoroughly on the surface to activate the gluten. Do this for around 4-5 minutes. Leave the dough in a bowl, cover it with a damp cloth for 3 - 4 hours (depending on the weather; yeast requires warm and humid surrounding conditions to do its thing and rise the dough). Your dough would have now doubled (or even more) in size. Dust a flast surface and knock out all the air from the risen dough, knead it couple of times and then get it into the desired shape. Lightly grease the bread tin. Place the dough into the tin. Cover the tray with cling wrap and leave it to further rise for around 2 hours. The dough would have nicely risen by now.
Pre-heat the oven @ 180º C. Bake the bread for about 40 minutes. Once done, take it off the oven, brush some oil on the top to avoid a hard crust. Take the bread out of the tin and on to a wire rack for cooling.
You can make your favorite sandwich or simply settle down with jam/peanut butter/nutella.