Here’s why homemade bread is so delicious
Bread rightly occupies a special place in our diet: Baked with flour from whole grains, it contains an incredible amount of vitamins, minerals and fiber. It tastes even better than store-bought bread, but how often do you get to bake it yourself? Baking bread quickly is no problem if you have the right recipe. For fresh bread from your own oven, we have put together three recipes that you can bake in no time, even with simple ingredients. Enjoy your meal!
Bread baking recipe: Bake bread quickly and easy
The classic yeast dough is made quite quickly and works even with little experience. Start by mixing 500g of flour (for example wheat flour) with 1TL of salt. To prepare the yeast, heat 350ml water (not too hot, about 45 degrees), stir in 1TL sugar and then crumble a cube of yeast into it. Stir until the yeast has dissolved. Next, mix the yeast water into the flour, add a dash of olive oil and knead well. For a special taste, you can also add herbs, dried tomatoes or nuts. Now you can put the dough into a greased loaf pan, smooth the top and make a long cut about 1cm deep in the middle. For a crispy top you can spread herb curd, yogurt or milk. The whole thing then goes into the oven for 40 to 45 minutes, which you have previously heated to about 190 degrees top / bottom heat. Baking bread quickly is even easier if you have an automatic bread maker. With this device, the bread bakes itself, which is very convenient for busy people.
Bake bread quickly with dry yeast
You don’t have any yeast cubes at hand right now, but you would like to bake a quick bread? No problem, you can do it with dry yeast! For this French bread with dry yeast – or should we say: Pain avec de la levure sèche? – you have to mix the yeast with a few tablespoons of warm water. Compared to the cube, however, it needs a little more time, so you should put it in a warm place for about 10 to 15 minutes. Then mix the yeast with 330g of wheat flour and 10g of salt. Then knead everything well and let it stand for another 35 minutes. You can preheat the oven to 240 degrees. Then form the dough into a ball and put it on the baking tray for about 30 minutes in the oven. To make the crust extra crispy, put a glass of water in the bottom of the oven. The steam ensures a smooth surface.
Bake bread quickly: without yeast, but with banana!
Sweet bread also tastes fantastic! For this recipe you mix 80ml of sunflower oil (or another kind that tastes neutral), 110g of brown sugar and 2 eggs. Then you mix that with the vanilla from a pod, 200g flour, 3Tl baking powder and 1 pinch each of salt and cinnamon. Then add 3 mashed bananas mixed with a little butter, the riper the tastier. Put the whole thing into a greased loaf pan and bake your banana cake for 55 minutes in the oven preheated to about 180 degrees. It tastes even better if you add chopped walnuts or pecans to the batter before baking. Enjoy it!
Bake bread quickly: Thermomix recipes
If you want to bake bread quickly, it’s especially easy with the Thermomix and only takes 10 minutes of work time. Plus, with this recipe, you can use up the potatoes from the day before right away. For a delicious swirl bread, first put 200g of spelt in the Thermomix and grind everything for 1 minute on speed 10. Then add 150g of cooked potatoes, which of course must already have cooled down, and grind everything on speed 4. Next, add 300g wheat flour, 350ml lukewarm buttermilk, 1 tsp sugar or honey, 1 yeast cube and 1 tsp salt and knead for 3 minutes. Then take the dough out of the Thermomix, wrap it in baking paper and twirl the ends together and put the loaf in the oven. To allow air to escape during baking, make sure the open side of the paper is facing up. Then turn on the oven to 200 degrees and let your bread bake for 50 minutes.
How do I know if my bread is done?
Especially if you don’t have much experience or if you have a new oven, it can be easy to pull your bread out of the oven and it’s baked nice and crispy on the outside, but still doughy and raw on the inside! So how can you tell if your bread is cooked?
The knock test
A fully baked loaf has lots of tiny air bubbles, almost like a sponge. This makes it sound hollow when you tap it against the bottom of your bread. On the other hand, if the dough inside the bread is soft, the sound will be more muffled.
The toothpick test
If you don’t want to burn your fingers on the hot bread, you can poke a toothpick into it instead. If you pull it out again and there are only dry crumbs on it, but no soft dough, then your bread is done baking.
How does my homemade bread get a nice crust?
Steaming closes the pores
For an even and shiny crust, place a glass of water at the bottom of your oven. The steam activates the enzymes in the bread dough, which then seal into a smooth crust. Ice cubes have the same effect, only here, of course, it takes a little longer to evaporate.
Brushing the dough
To make your bread crust shiny, brush the loaf with a mixture of milk and egg before baking. If you want a darker color, you can use black coffee or syrup instead. For a special taste, you can also use olive oil to coat the loaf.
Baking in the bread pot
A clay bread pan has the advantage of retaining moisture very well and releasing it to the crust. If you want to bake your bread in a bread pot, you should leave the lid on for 40 minutes at the beginning before you take it off and let the bread bake open for the rest of the time. This will prevent the crust from cracking, for example.
Choose the right temperature
For extra crispiness, change the temperature. When you preheat the oven, set it to 250 degrees; when you put the dough in, turn it down to 200 degrees. The heat at the beginning ensures that the crust is nice and hard, but when the temperature drops again afterwards, the bread has enough time to bake through without becoming too dark on the outside.
How do I adapt the recipe to my needs?
Whether it’s for ethical, health or fitness reasons: Many of us today pay attention to our diet in some way and omit certain foods. We’ll give you a few examples of what you can substitute for each ingredient in the recipes above.
This is what you can use as an egg substitute
If you want to avoid eggs in your bread, you can easily replace them with bananas or applesauce. Both have a sticky consistency, so they can do a good job of holding the bread together. You’ll need either one banana per egg you want to replace, or 80 grams of applesauce instead of a 60 gram egg. Especially with applesauce, make sure you choose an unsweetened variety. If you want to use sweetened applesauce or a particularly ripe banana to make sweet bread, you should reduce the sugar accordingly.
Baking without sugar
Fruit bread, for example with banana, often contains sugar. However, you can easily replace it with a few natural variants. For example, instead of sugar, simply add some honey or maple syrup. A variant that not everyone has in their cupboard is agave syrup. The dark juice of the agave, a plant with pointed leaves that can grow several meters tall, is particularly versatile because it has no flavor of its own. For all variants, the ratio is 5:4, which means that you exchange 50g of sugar from the recipe with 40g of your sugar substitute.
