Good recipe for everyday sandwich bread?
Hey all, new to the forum - moderately experienced home cook but a definite novice in the baking arena.
My first goal is to produce a tasty general sandwich bread, just your basic unbleached white type deal. Unfortunately all my early attempts have met with very mediocre results, so thought to see what you folks have to say.
I've been working from the basic sandwich bread in James Peterson's "Baking" book (after enjoying his similar introductory book "Cooking"). The results are inevitably a fairly dense loaf with small uniformly-shaped crumb - 'insipid' might be too harsh a word, but it comes pretty close to that. Have tried changing the wetness of the dough, used both dry activated and fresh block yeast, used both a loaf pan and rustic shaping (though the latter ended up spreading more than rising), etc, exact same results.
Could it be the recipe or is there some essential technique I'm missing? My girlfriend is starting to laugh at me from loaf after loaf of dense sponge brick! I'm not looking for beautiful artisan sourdoughs yet, just a sandwich bread that's airy, has some varied 'holes', and just a tiny bit of character... any suggestions - recipe or technique - would be much appreciated.
Try the bread recipe at AllRecipes.com for Amish sandwich bread. It is simple, true to the recipe and taste is excellent. Also, very good toast. The only change I made in the recipe was to change the amount of sugar down to 1/2 cup. If you read the "comments" most folks lessened the amount called for. The 1/2 cup is still sweet, just right. These are loaves that will go into a loaf pan for baking, not freeform. Sandwich bread. The recipe is easily followed.
In looking back on my early attempts at bread baking, I also was looking for the perfect recipe when the real problem was poor technique. Make sure you are developing the gluten enough so that the bread can rise enough and as long as you don't have an overly dry dough, I would expect you will see huge improvement.
Look at txfarmer's blog index in the section on soft and fluffy (they are sourdough, but techniques will work for yeasted dough with much shorter rise times)
wayne
Technique really is most likely the problem, however, if a person can't master a simple recipe, all of the jargon in the very excellent blog by txfarmer will not make sense. In a simple bread recipe, all of those techniques are not really needed. They are more helpful in the more complicated recipes when you run into problems such as sticky doughs too hard to manage, etc. The basic recipe for Amish sandwich bread requires little in the way of expertise and the results are pretty tasty. Maybe master that then go on to more complicated breads, not to be overwhelmed at this point.
Take a look at the crumb in the picture on this King Arthur flour page. Is that what you're after? Recipe is posted.
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/king-arthurs-classic-white-sandwich-bread-recipe
Marty