The Easiest Bread You Ever Made

I have recently been pursuing making homemade bread. So far it's going OK. It takes years to perfect a good loaf and so far I've just been following recipes and learning the right places in my house to rise bread.

The other day I was doing laundry in the basement and saw my bread machine. It was all dusty with that sketchy kinda dust that comes from basements...but I hauled it up the stairs (this is an exaggeration...it weighs less than my dog)...and cleaned it up. Then I looked up a recipe for a really simple bread.

I was looking for something that used the bread maker start to finish, but ended up picking one that mixed the dough and did the first rise, and then you transfered to a pan for the second rise and bake. In the end, I think the results were good...and I learned that a bread machine can really cut down on the time you need to make bread! I had forgotten this.

The recipe I used was some random recipe from a website called "Soft As Wonder White" - I wouldn't really call this bread anything like wonder bread...but it was definitely a white bread, and it was soft, and good.

In order to use this recipe you probably need a bread maker. I suppose you don't have to have one...but the point of this post is how EASY it was with a bread maker. You get to stick all the ingredients in the bread maker and come back almost 2 hours later for a nice dough that's already had its first rise! Awesome.

The Easiest White Bread Ever

• 1 C. Water
• 1 Tsp. Salt
• 3 Tbsp. Margarine or butter
• 1 Tbsp. Honey
• 3 C. All-Purpose Flour
• 1/4 C. Powdered Milk** (See notes below)
• 2 Tsp. Sugar
• 1 1/2 Tsp. Bread Machine/Rapid Rise/Instant yeast (all essentially the same)

1. Add the ingredients into the bread machine in the order listed.
2. Set to the dough cycle. This will mix the dough and then rise the bread, and should take about 1 hour 40 minutes.
3. When the timer on the bread machine reads 1 hour, turn the oven onto 400 for about 3 minutes, and then turn it off.
4. When the timer goes off on the bread machine, turn the dough out gently onto a floured surface. Mold it into a loaf as gently as possible. Try not to work the dough much.
5. Put the loaf in a loaf pan and cover it with a towel. Place this in your oven which should now be luke warm. Make sure the towel won't inhibit the rising of the bread by being caught under the pan.
6. Rise 40 mins or until doubled in size. (When it looks like a loaf of bread...that's when it's ready to bake)
7. Bake at 350° for 25 to 30 minutes.
   
8. Take out of pan and cool.

NOTE: If you're using a very dark bread pan, knock the heat down to 325.

**Powdered milk can be purchased at the grocery store but usually does NOT come in any kind of reasonable size. In fact, I had to buy a box that would make like 50 gallons of nasty watery skim milk. HOWEVER....this is a VERY COMMON ingredient in bread recipes and it essentially can't easily be substituted with regular milk. So just suck it up and buy it if you're going to be baking bread regularly.