Anyone can make bread. After all, people have been making bread for thousands of years. You can make bread, too! This is a very simple recipe for making a white bread. It is an Amish recipe that can be used for loaf bread or rolls.
You can make bread by hand, without a bread maker or machine of any kind. That’s how people used to make it, and you can, too. It will take perseverance and lots of energy. You will need a heavy spoon for beating the ingredients until the dough gets too stiff to beat. Then you will turn it out onto the counter-top and knead the dough.
To knead, you will push your fists into the dough and push the dough forward. then you will grasp the dough that has been pushed forward and pull it down over the rest of the dough, pushing it into the rest of the dough. Do this over and over. Add flour if the dough is sticky, just a little at a time, until you have a smooth, elastic dough. I will be using an electric kneader in these instructions, but they are perfectly suited for making bread by hand.
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups warm milk
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 heaping Tablespoon shortening
2 Tablespoons salt
6 -7 cups bread flour
1 Tablespoon lecithin powder optional, helps the bread stay fresh longer)
I have been having lots of trouble with bread not rising lately, and it has been due to the yeast. Sometimes bread will rise one time and then not again, this is usually due to weak, almost dead, yeast. So, I’ve gone back to proofing my yeast. Here is how to do that.
Put the amount of yeast you are using in a teacup. Add a pinch of sugar and about 1/2 cup warm milk. Let it sit until you can see the yeast start to foam and bubble. This will take from one or two to 10 minutes. If it doesn’t foam and bubble, you know that your yeast is not going to make your bread rise. Discard it and go buy some new yeast.
Preheat your oven to 500* F . When your dough is ready to rise, you will turn the oven off and place the dough in the oven with the door cracked open.
Proof your yeast as instructed above and let it sit in the cup until you have the other ingredients combined:
Combine the rest of the milk, sugar, lecithin if using, shortening and salt. Add the yeast/sugar mixture.
Add four cups of flour, one cup at a time, beating well. I use a dough hook from the very beginning, but you can 
start with a paddle and change to the hook if you like.
Now start adding the flour just 1/2 cup at a time. Depending on the weather, you may need from 6 to even 8 cups of flour for this recipe. Today I used just 5 1/2 cups. Knead the dough well between additions of flour.
As you add flour, look for the dough to stop being sticky, and watch for it to start pulling away from the sides of the pan. You may need to stop your machine and scrape the dough from the sides of the bowl a few times.
Now allow the dough to knead for 10 minutes. If you are kneading by hand, you will knead it for 15-20 minutes, and that will depend on how strong and good you are at kneading. 
While it is kneading, you can grease a large pan for the dough to rise in.
After it has kneaded for 10 minutes, you can see how smooth the dough is and how it has cleaned off the sides of the pan.
Take the dough out of the mixing bowl and shape it into a mushroom by folding the edges under, under, under all the way around.
Now grab the dough firmly and place the dough in the greased pan, top side down. Rub the dough around in the grease, then turn it over so that both the top and bottom will be greased.
Turn off your oven. Place a clean cloth over the dough in the pan and place the pan in the oven. Leave the door cracked and allow the dough to rise until it is doubled in size. this can take from 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on your oven and the weather.
OK, now your dough is risen!
Preheat the oven to 325*F.
Grease two loaf pans. I prefer smaller pans because the bread rises higher in them and I get big slices for sandwiches. As you make more bread, you can decide what kind of pans you like. If you don’t have loaf pans you can use casserole dishes or even place the dough on a cookie sheet for a round loaf with lots of crust.
Take out the dough and divide it into two equal portions. I just pinch the dough into two portions, but if you prefer, you can pay the dough on the counter and cut it into two portions.
Shape each portion into a mushroom and pinch together the dough on the bottom of the mushroom. Place each portion of shaped dough into a greased loaf pan.
Pierce the tops of the dough with a fork a few times. This allows air to flow through the bread and gives the tops a nice look when the bread is done.
Cover with a clean cloth and allow to rise until it is at least 1 inch above the pan. If you are not using a pan, you should let the dough rise on a greased cookie sheet until it is doubled in size. This rising is not done in the oven but on top of the oven, since it is nice and warm now.
Now place the risen pans of dough in the oven and bake for 25 minutes. When you take them out, leave the bread in the pans for 5 minutes. While the bread is still in the pans, rub the tops and sides with butter, this makes the crust soft and delicious.
After 5 minutes, turn the bread out of the pans and allow to cool on a wire rack. If you don’t have a wire rack, and you bake a lot, you really should get one. They are very helpful for cooking baked goods quickly and evenly.
Once the bread is cool enough to eat, you are going to have a hard time keeping people out of the kitchen, so go ahead and slice one loaf and serve it with butter and jam.
To store this bread, you must wait til it is cool, then wrap in paper or plastic. Without the lecithin it will last about 4-5 days on the shelf, but I don’t think your bread is going to be around that long.
About Wardeh
We love homemade bread here.
So do we….. as you can tell by my ample double chin hahaha!
I hope the tutorial is helpful to you, or if its not something you need, how about some tips of your own??
Love
Sylvia
I just don’t get bread like yours in the pic it just willll not rise the second time HELP
Dana
There could be several reasons why your bread is not rising the second time. I will let the things that I think could be causing it. maybe you could work on each one til you find out what is going on.
1. Your pans could be too large for the amount of dough you are using. A good dough will only rise just so high and you may need to use smaller pans. I find that the usual 9×5 pans are a bit too big for this recipe. I like my bread to rise up high so I use a little smaller pan, mine are about 8×4″.
2. Your yeast may be old. Yeast is a living organism and it will often stop growing as actively as it once did, and will eventually die. Be sure you store your yeast in a cool dry place and use it before the expiration date. I have even had some yeast go bad before the expiration date, probably because it was not stored correctly at some point in its manufacturing. You can check your yeast to see if it is active by putting it in about 1/2 cup of warm liquid you are using in the recipe along with a pinch of sugar. In about 10 minutes, the yeast should be foaming and bubbly. If it isn’t, then your yeast is probably old and won’t work as well in the recipe. After using this “sponging” method a few times, you will be able to just look at the foaming yeast and tell if it is good enough to use.
3. Don’t allow your dough to rise too high the first time. It should only rise about an hour. After that, the gas pockets in the dough made by the yeast will begin to break down, and the gluten fibers will weaken and the yeast will reproduce all it is able, not leaving anything for the second rise. Then the second rise won’t be as big because the yeast has already done its thing.
4. There is the possibility that your dough isn’t in a warm enough place in order for the dough to rise that second time.
5. One thing you can do is to allow the bread to rise just 1 inch over the pan ( a smaller pan, remember) and then pop it into the oven to finish up as it bakes, even if it has only risen 30-45 minutes and not the full hour that it might normally rise.
I hope you can find something here that helps!
Sylvia
I too make bread! My husband has a medical condition which requires a very high fiber diet, so to anyone in that situation, I thought I might share my recipe. We buy about $200-$250 worth of grain at the beginning of the year, and that feeds our family of 6 all year long! We mill the grain fresh, and use a wide variety of grains. It’s very healthy and saves a bundle! Anyway, I follow a similar process, but here’s my recipe:
1 Tbsp yeast
2 cups warm water (a little warmer than a bath)
1/3 cup honey (raw is best)
Mix till yeast is dissolved, then let “sponge” (get bubbly) for about 10 min.
Then I add in:
1 Tbsp oil (canola or olive)
5-6 cups of Whole Wheat flour (or half whole wheat and half whatever other grains – kamut, barley, amaranth, flax mixture, etc.)
2 tsp salt
Knead well for about 5 min., let rise once (about 30 min); punch down and shape into loaves, mini-loaves, pizza dough, pita pockets, etc…whatever you want to make it, and let it rise a second time. Bake at 350 till golden brown. Yum!
Thanks for teaching our women on bakery. I want you to use another name for lecithin and also shortening.
Is it not good to start the baking by putting the flour in the pan, then add other
ingredient and start mixing?
I read your blog article (by the way, I don’t bake bread in the summer months due to the Alabama heat), but I had to comment–I bought 4 varieties of tomatoes this year–yellow pear, Brandywine, Stripey and German Queen. And my German Queen is the slowest to do anything. Although it is taller than my 54″ cage like the other plants, it doesn’t look like it is going to produce well, while all my others are looking great. We’ve been eating the yellow pears already. Is there something special I needed to know about this variety of tomato? Do you have tips?
I read your blog article (by the way, I don’t bake bread in the summer months due to the Alabama heat), but I had to comment–I bought 4 varieties of tomatoes this year–yellow pear, Brandywine, Stripey and German Queen. And my German Queen is the slowest to do anything. Although it is taller than my 54″ cage like the other plants, it doesn’t look like it is going to produce well, while all my others are looking great. We’ve been eating the yellow pears already. Is there something special I needed to know about this variety of tomato? Do you have tips?
There was a time when I had all the children at ho me and had to bake in the wee hours of the morning to keep from heating up the house! And …..Now that you mention it ….. we weren’t seeing any bees and wasps around this summer so we hand pollinated the German Queen and the other tomatoes. After we did that, we had lots of blooms that set fruit. Since tomatoes are self-pollinating all you need to do is to shake or flick the flowers on each plant.
I have been shaking my tomato plants–plus we’ve had some storms. We had wind so bad the other day that all my pole bean vines (except the one that is 5-6 ft. long) unwrapped themselves from their poles. We went around the poles by hand re-wrapping them! That German Queen is just not very productive compared to the others.
Hmmm…. well, is it setting blooms? if its making blooms then I’d still say its probably a pollination problem. But if its not setting blooms, it may have other problems and need some 8-32-16 or 6-24-24 fertilizer.
I’ll look at it more closely, but I know it has some flowers and some fruit, not anything large yet. It is shorter than anything but the yellow pears. And the German bush is about half as bushy as the Brandywine and about one-third as bushy as the Stripey. Maybe it produces better later in the summer?
Michelle it might have gotten a little colder than you realized a night or two early in the season which can affect plants. Since it has some fruit tho, it’s likely not the cause. My suggestion would be organic kelp or fish fertilizer to give it a boost. Also, you might try adding some calcium and scratching it into the surface around your plant. You called it a ‘bush’… is it determinate or indeterminant?
Megan, it looks like it is indeterminant, according to what I could google. We were too late to begin from seed due to a change in our summer plans, so we bought heirloom tomato and pepper plants from Lowe’s, though we planted some cucumbers, beans, peas, etc. from seed about the same time. Some of the soil does have some Miracle Grow in it, and we added a little of the Lowe’s fruit and veggie fertilizer. Plus I’ve been putting our egg shells out in the garden for calcium. They seem to be liking the egg shells.
Yes, the German Queen is indeterminant. It could need fertilizer but don’t give it too much nitrogen; that will be at the expense of the blooms. It may just not have had time to grow as big as it needs to be to produce well. Ours has been in the ground since early May so its pretty large right now.
If it’s indeterminate you can pick off the suckers. Google for pictures or video. They are the small leaves/branches that form between main stems and they produce nothing put leaves. By picking them on indeterminate varieties you help the plant focus its energy to the main stems and fruit.
If it’s indeterminate you can pick off the suckers. Google for pictures or video. They are the small leaves/branches that form between main stems and they produce nothing put leaves. By picking them on indeterminate varieties you help the plant focus its energy to the main stems and fruit.