The Delight of Homemade Sandwich Bread: A Journey to Nourish and Savor

My journey with homemade cooking with intentional ingredients started with bread. My kids love pb and jelly sandwiches. They love toast. They love buttered bread. They love all bread, really. Exactly like their mother. I always bought whole wheat, or some other “no high fructose corn syrup” bread, but still when you look at the back of the ingredient list on the bread from the store it is still waaay too long. Soy this, and enriched that. I just had had enough. Additionally, the bread I wanted to keep buying was $3.65 a loaf, and with 6 people eating bread it was gone in two days.

I had always heard of sourdough, but I didn’t get the hype. Until I learned that because of the way it ferments and literally grown in your kitchen; you are able to digest it way better. Its essentially the old school way of making bread without using yeast packets. This knowledge came to me right at the start of the pandemic where you couldn’t really find yeast packets and people online were selling them for $50 a pack. I thought to myself, ” I would never be dependent on yeast packets again.” So I learned sourdough. If you feed it often enough, you’ll always have the possibility of making homemade fresh bread. Truly, the art of sourdough has taught me a lot about myself. For one, I wasn’t really good at time management and bread forces you to think in that way. That makes it sound complicated and hard, but I promise you it isn’t. Time does most of the work for you, and that’s the beauty of it.

Today, we aren’t making sourdough though. That will be a post coming soon. Today is how I make bread when I forget to feed my sourdough starter (cause I still struggle with time) and I have a couple of yeast packets around. I make it just like the way I do with my sourdough’s ingredients, but I’m just adding yeast instead of starter. It’s a good beginner loaf and it’s still cleaner than a store bought loaf. Sometimes I add my unfed sourdough starter to the yeast to still have that sourdough taste, but you definitely don’t have to. I always make two loaves at a time for my family. Bread freezes just fine if you decide on making it like the recipe. If not, just cut the ingredients in half.

My kids love fresh bread so much that now when store bought is given to us, or used at a relative’s house they usually say, “This smells different!”. I think they are smelling the chemicals! I have zero guilt about feeding them homemade bread a lot, especially not sourdough. I use King Arthur unbleached flour. It’s the best my wallet can afford and I think it does produce a nice product. One day I’ll afford that 17.99 bag of Italian flour off amazon, but for now, that’s what I use.

There is nothing quite like the smell of a house when bread is cooking in the oven. I really hope my kids associate that smell with home as they get older. If you start implementing healthy choices in your family’s diet, I really can’t recommend to start with bread enough. Even if it’s just one day a week! I promise it’s easier than you think and so worth it! Skip that soybean oil and give it a try!

Tips

1: Get yourself a scale. I know in America we go by cups and tablespoons, BUT most everything in the bread world is done in grams. It’s actually way easier to get the correct measurements this way.

2. You can line your bread tins with parchment paper, but I smear butter on them. My life is too short to not do that.

3. It might take some experimentation to get your oven time down. I was learning from a girl in Utah not realizing elevation affects cook time. I made a few underdone loafs before I realized this. My sweet spot is 45 minutes with sandwich breads here in Ohio, but ultimately they should be medium golden brown and hard when your tap them just coming out.They get softer as they cool.

4. Lastly, when you pull them out and set them on the rack to cool they are still cooking! Wait (if you can) to let them cool mostly before trying to cut them. They will be difficult to cut if too hot. Warm is fine!