Baking Bread

Baking bread will allow you to produce 'artisanal' bread at the price of cheap wonderbread. The benefit: it tastes better, you can customize with whatever flavors you want, and you know exactly what went into it.

A youtube tutorial is available: Perfect French Bread in Ten Minutes.

There are four ingredients:

• Water
• Flour (4 cups)
• Yeast (1 tbsp)
• Salt (1 tbsp)

Mix yeast and some warm water. Let sit 5 minutes. Mix more warm water and the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the yeast-water. Continue mixing until the flour pulls away from the bowl. Dump on floured counter, knead for 1-2 minutes. Let sit 5 minutes. Knead briefly and place in covered bowl for 2 hours. Knead again. Store in refrigerator or shape into bread. Place on buttered baking sheet. Wait 30 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

You can substitute quite easily: white flour can be replaced entirely with wheat flour. You can partly replace flour with oats that were ground in a blender. Water can be replaced with some milk, or with whey (the super-healthy run-off from yogurt). You can dump in pepper, garlic, cheese, etc. Experiment.