The BEST Homemade Sandwich Bread Recipe

Hello honey, welcome to the farmer's table. I'm Jess and I'm so glad you're here today. I'm going to make a video today, after a little break. I had a culinary hangover from Thanksgiving and I took a few days off from not only making cooking videos but from cooking all together, we ate a lot of leftovers and then we had a couple of days where it was either chopped cooking or just throwing together something quick, uh , but today I am back with what I believe. It might be the most requested

recipe

I've had since starting this channel and it's for a good

sandwich

bread

recipe

.

Now whenever I started learning to cook from scratch, learning to make

bread

was at the top of the list and I made a lot of breads. I tried a lot of different recipes, some of which were big hits and some of which were big flops, but I had never Found the perfect

sandwich

bread recipe and this is just a simple bread recipe that picky kids are clearly not. They're going to be despised and, most importantly, they can be easily cut so you can make sandwiches, so a lot of bread recipes are very crumbly and every time you cut them, they just disintegrate into crumbs, which obviously isn't going to work when we're trying to make a sandwich for a school lunch five years ago, maybe a little longer than that.

My friend Amanda Paladini shared with me her favorite sandwich bread recipe that she usually made for her children's school lunches and I tried it for her. I finished the search for me, it is without a doubt the

best

sandwich bread recipe I have ever tried, so I am very grateful to Amanda. Her channel is Welcome Grove Homestead and she shares a lot about her Homestead, which is now located in East Tennessee so we can All thanks to Amanda for ending our search for the perfect sandwich bread recipe today. I'm going to make this with my kitchen aid mix.

With any bread recipe like this, you can make it by hand. You will only need one more Knead it. It will take a little more muscle. Honestly, this is the kind of task I usually do as a side job in my kitchen. I usually focus on something else and start with the bread. I start it up. so it can rise the first time and then the second time and bake, it's never the main thing I do because you have these big periods of downtime where you're not practical. I also have a bread machine. a separate video showing my bread maker and the recipe I make there because bread is something I really hate buying at the store, the number one reason is that it's full of all kinds of preservatives and chemical ingredients that I don't like buying .

It has a lot of growth inhibitors to prevent mold from growing and more than that if you want to buy a quality bread, so if you decide to read the ingredient labels and try to buy the

best

bread on the shelf, it still has stuff. I don't love it, it's like $7 a loaf, which is crazy to have to pay so much for something you can literally make for less than $1 a loaf at home, probably even less than that if you buy your ingredients at Bowl as is usual, I will have the main recipe in the section shown.

It will say Amanda's best bread recipe and you can click on it to print it and have it for easy reference whenever you start talking to people about cooking from scratch. and reduce her grocery budget, my suggestion is always to start, if you consume bread products, by preparing them at home. You can control a lot more what's in them, but again, it's a way to save money, so I. I'm going to start by putting three cups of flour in this bowl. Marginal note. I buy my flour in bulk and I buy these big food safe containers at a restaurant supply store and this is what I keep: flour and sugar, actually several staples. to add 2 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt, you'll see my measuring spoons for salt and 1 and 1/2 tablespoons of instant yeast.

I now store my yeast in an airtight jar in the freezer. I take it out for recipes and then put it back in there to make sure it stays fresher longer. If your yeast is old your bread will not rise properly so you need to make sure you are working with fresh yeast and here you can use a/4 uh. a cup of honey or maple syrup also works well for this. I have used it when I am in a pinch today I am using honey. Normally I use honey and now I want to add 2 and 3/4 cups like very warm water.

Now we don't want this to be boiling, you don't need to turn the kettle on or anything, you want it to be where you can comfortably put your fingers underneath it, we don't want it to burn, that will damage our yeast, but we also need it to be hot enough to activate. yeast now for most baked goods. I prefer recipes that do weights instead of measurements, but I can tell you with this recipe for spreading things like very warm water and you know these cups and different measurements, it's not. super accurate and this bread has always turned out well for me so I'm going to keep sharing it that way and then I'm going to add 1/4 cup of oil and here you want to make a neutral oil so I'm using avocado oil today sometimes I melt lard .

I've melted butter for this before and we want to give it a little mix. um, you're not trying to combine all these ingredients well. You could make something like bread. hook, but I think it's better to use something like a spoon or a spatula to make sure there aren't any big clumps of flour on the bottom and we're going to give you a mixture that will be very runny. uh and we're going to let this sit for about 10 minutes uh and it'll start to bubble and that yeast with that warm water and the honey will start to activate, we'll come back in 10 minutes, 10 minutes later, look. this nice bubbly activated yeast here in this mixture looks exactly as I expected and you can see I didn't mix it well there are little bits of flour which is fine now this recipe calls for a total of 6 and 1/2 a 7 and 1/2 cups of flour to make these two loaves of bread, we already put three in the bowl, that is, from here we are going to start adding 3 and 1/2 more and then from there we are going to add another cup if necessary, now there are some nuances when it comes to cooking and baking and I can tell you a few things to look for, but it can be a little different every time when it comes to something like this now.

I can't tell you the science behind this. I'm sure someone could know more than me. I don't know what makes it work the way it does, but I know that sometimes it's raining outside and that changes the way the bread works. sometimes I use different flour from a different manufacturer and it changes the way the bread works. I want to give you a bit of encouragement if you're just starting to cook, as people who are afraid of failing, we have a tendency to just say right away. oh I'm so bad at it, I'm such a bad cook oh I tried baking bread but I'm so bad at it, you just don't have practice and I'm so bad at cutting hair because I never learned. and it's one of those things that I accept the fact that I don't know how to do it and I pay someone else to do it for me and unfortunately because so many people have taken that route to cooking, our food system is what it is. today you don't have to keep paying someone else to bake your bread you're just going to have to learn how to do it so we're going to start with 3 and 1/2 cups and let's see how that goes and if you start with 3 and 1/2 cups and You end up making your bread and it's not the best bread you've ever had, do it again and do it again and do it again until you finally know exactly what your dough is supposed to look like, what you want, okay, let's put this in. in medium low.

I don't want to go too high because I'm not trying to paint my kitchen with flour if you want. do i ever measure flour um you know it's best to make sure the flour is nice and loose. This is one of the reasons I like weighing recipes, but you never want to bag it, we want it nice and loose. I'm always scooping up the flour, it's another reason I like to work with flour in a big container like this because I can make sure I don't compact the tablespoon and add back in, okay, I have 7 equal cups of total flour here I'm going to scrape it up. this and making sure all the flour is incorporated.

Depending on your mixer, you may need to scrape all the way to the bottom to make sure there isn't a pocket of flour down there that can Sometimes it happens that I'm going to add that last little bit to the 7 and 1/2 cups, my dough doesn't really It was coming together like I like to see, it wasn't starting to pull away from the sides, it was still very sticky, so I went ahead and added another cup of flour, which brought me to a total of 8 and 1/2 cups. This will be something you'll have to play with if you're using a recipe that doesn't require weights. and this is knowledge that can be applied no matter what baking recipe you are making, if you are making any type of bread, you want to make sure that you are forming a proper dough, so with 8 and 1/2 cups of flour.

I want this mixture to knead for at least 3 minutes until it stops breaking up and the dough starts to look soft in the unetched bowl, so you want to scrape it down. I used a small spatula and scraped it into a large greased bowl. enough for the dough to double in size, you can see, I have this, you can drizzle it, you can rub it with butter, whatever you're going to do, just make sure it's well greased, if you're going to cover this with plastic. Wrap, go ahead and also grease the plastic wrap in case you pick it up and touch it so it doesn't tear.

I always use a large dish towel and I always use a container that has enough room that it's probably not going to touch the dish towel, so this first rise will take about an hour. We're looking for this dough to double inside, so I'm going to set my timer to start at 50 minutes. and check it out now a note on bread rising if your house is very cold your bread isn't going to rise either there are a couple of options here you can put the bowl on top of your refrigerator where it can be. a little bit warmer, um, you can put it in like the oven or the microwave, don't turn them on, but where it may be a little bit warmer than outside, like in a drafty part of your kitchen, and one thing I've seen done to the people.

It's taking like Stringer Christmas lights or a heating pad and all these different things that have never really been necessary for me. We keep our house, you know, at about 68° like in the winter. Right now there are like 24 celi. I mean, it's like it's hot. It's by no means very hot here, but it's definitely hot. It may take a little longer, that's really what will continue to go up. It's just going to take a little bit longer, so I'll take a look at it in 50. minutes and see where we are and hopefully it'll have probably doubled by then we want to go ahead and prepare two loaf pans by greasing them.

I use these Pampered Chef bread pans from Stone wear, that's what I've baked bread for. a lot of time, but you can use glass if all you have is a metal pan, you can use a metal pan, that way you'll get a harder crust. I prefer Stonar glass because you get smoother crusts, which is what we typically do. I'm looking for like a sandwich bread, but the best mold is the one you have, so grease them and get them ready for this bread to assemble, okay guys, it's been about 55 minutes and my dough has doubled. It looks really delicious, it smells really nice and yeasty and here I'm going to show you what I do as far as separating this and putting it in the pan, so first we're going to punch our dough into the most satisfying part of making the bread that lets it come out. all the air and at this point Some people will tell you to place this like a surface with flowers and work it.

I don't want to have to clean my counters. I want less things to wash in my life, not more, so I just pick it up and roll it a few times. Sometimes in this greased mold I lift this bread and I break this dough about in half, I usually don't do a very exact job, I pinch it like this and let it fall into my molds. This would have been better if I had put a little oil in it. my hands I'm going to do that for the next one, okay, a little bit of oil on my hands, I grab the next loaf and I just want to shape it so it's smooth on the top, take the pinched area, bring it down, um, I didn't make them very uniformly.

Sometimes I do it better than others. Not recommended. I'm going to remove a little bit of this. Add it to the bottom of this and there I have my two loaves. Basically, you just want to take that. dough and separate it into two loaves. Sometimes when I make video tutorials, I'm tempted not to do things like that because I want to show you the right way. I want to show you the fail-safe way. I want to show you what everyone. more shows you, but the truth is that this is how I put my bread in the molds every time because I don't want to flour the surface.

I don't want to have to scrape out the flour. I don't want to have to do it. I clean it so I do it like this and sometimes I end up with slightly uneven loaves, but whenever I make my kids sandwiches with this bread, they don't complain that maybe sometimes one slice is a little bigger than the other . right now we're going to preheat our oven to 350 and start our second rise now, this time I'm going to wet this towel, okay, I've got this wet, it's not soggy, it's not going to wet my buns. but I wanted to put the wet towel here for this second rise just so this dough is less likely tostick to 30 minutes on the timer.

Basically, I want to see this bread rise over the top of these pans. I would say it will probably double again and as soon as that happens. We will put it in the oven approximately 30 35 minutes later. I just removed the towel from my risen dough. You want to make sure the dough is over the top of the mold. It will rise a little more in the oven. you have to be careful with it when you handle it at this point because if you make a hole in it, remember when we hit it it let all the air out, we don't want to do that now because we don't want to stop the rise, you can definitely overheat it or raise it too high where you leave it sit for too long and it will fall at that point if you let it rise too much and put it in the oven and it rises more.

We'll have loaves of bread this tall, we really don't want to end up with big air bubbles when we do that, so I tend to fan on the less rising side as long as it's above the top I consider it to have risen enough to put it in the oven, it's going to rise a little bit more um, I want this to fit in a bag, the sandwich, so I put air on this side, you probably have a window of about 30 minutes. here, uh, where it's still going to be fine either way, but this is when I like to put mine in the oven right when it's maybe just an inch over.

If that, uh, you could let it go a little further again, this is coming. until your PR I like to put them in the middle of the oven, you don't want them too close to the top because they will rise higher in the oven and we don't want them touching the top of the oven. but I like to go right in the middle 30 minutes Oven at 350° I'll see you then okay so 3 2 minutes later my bread is out I'm going to grab some butter real quick, I'm going to go over the top with this butter. It's been better to melt this and just brush it on, but you know, best plans for the legs, my kids are home now so I'm distracted and I'm going to put them back in the oven for a minute to get this done.

Brown, here's my bread, it's out of the oven. We usually want to let it cool so we can cut it into slices for sandwiches. My kids are here now and they just got home from school so we're going to go ahead and cut into one of these now they'll let out a lot of steam and I think technically that can make the remaining bread stale faster, however the Fresh bread never lasts long enough to go stale. Here you have a couple of options here, you can keep it as a ziplock bag once it's completely cool don't put it in a ziplock bag when it's still hot or the steam will soak it once it's completely cool you can put it in a ziplock bag and it will it will keep fresh for a few days, um You can freeze it and then thaw it and use it, so if you don't need both loaves, that's one thing you can do.

Fresh bread goes stale faster. It just doesn't have all those preservatives that we normally use. What we do is use it for sandwiches, when it starts to go stale, we won't toast it for sandwiches or make things like grilled cheese. We want to go ahead and take it out of the pans quickly to let it cool because again you're going to do it. condensation so let's do this and I like to just put it on a rack to cool so it comes to room temperature, but I'm going to break the rules and cut it hot because I have kids who want a snack um let's see.

There we have it, there's the crumb, um, as you can see, even though it's very hot, it can be sliced, it doesn't fall apart, this is a great sandwich bread and it's also delicious just to eat, everyone's going to buy some. I have a drooling audience. on the other side of the camera, my favorite easy, simple, basic bread recipe, it's delicious, makes fantastic sandwiches and makes the kids happy, thank you all for hanging out with me today. I bless you until next time.