Making some dough.

Bread is the staff of life. It’s been made by people for literally dozens of years. It is part of almost every cultural heritage, and you should make some.

This isn’t how to make bread. There are more than three existing videos and blog posts about that already on the internet. This is how I make bread, and flatbreads, and pizza. This is just me encouraging you to go do that thing, because it’s not that hard.

Making the perfect loaf of bread is impossible. At least for me to do it. Someone I’m sure cranks out perfect bread daily. I make bread that I like. I don’t try very hard, because I’m too GenX to put a lot of effort into anything, really. The perfect bread for me is the bread that I can have often, that I enjoy, and that doesn’t require that I become an expert breadmaker.

Being an expert is annoying. Both annoying to get there, also annoying to talk to someone who believes that they’ve gotten there. I’ve been fixing computers for 30+ years, and I’ve had to clean up after a lot of experts. I’ve also had to have a lot of conversations with experts who were so confidently wrong that stories of their aggressive ignorance are still circulating in certain circles decades later.

So unless baking bread is going to be your whole personality (you know who you are), just have fun with it.

My most frequent bread project is pizza. Pizza is the staff of life, it’s been made by people for literally dozens of years. You should make some.

This is not how to make pizza. This is how I make pizza. It’s not New York or Neapolitain, or Detroit, Chicago, or even Windsor style pizza. It’s just the pizza I like.

The day before I want pizza, I’ll put somewhere between 1 and a half to two cups of water in a bowl, and put in somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of yeast, along with one to three tablespoons of sugar.

Have I mentioned that making bread isn’t an exact science? If you yeet water, flour, and yeast into a bowl, you’ll get bread. It might not be great, but it will almost always work if you just look out for the “This is working” steps.

I’ll stir that up and let it sit for 5 minutes. If it’s bubbly, the yeast is good, and we can keep moving. If it’s not, there’s a sidequest to a store in your future, or you can start experimenting with Sourdough. That sounds like a lot of work.

Then I’ll stir in some flour. enough to make a goopy mess, a tbsp of salt, and somewhere between 3-8tbsp of oil. Then I’ll let it sit, covered for an hour. After that, I’ll stir in a bit more flour, hitting it with the stand mixer dough hook as I go. I stop adding flour when it looks like dough, and not like batter. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s still sticky, but it’s no longer “fluid” at this point.

Then I cover it again and wait for an hour. I should mention that the bowl should be a lot bigger than the volume of your dough. The cover should be plastic, metal, or glass, so the rising dough doesn’t stick to it.

After an hour, I’ll squish it to get rid of the big bubbles of gas, and knead it a bit. You don’t need technique, just fold and squish, if your hands are wet, it won’t stick to them very much, it will be fine. Then I put it back in the covered bowl and throw it in the fridge overnight.

It’s ready after somewhere between 2 and 30 hours.

When I think I will want pizza in 4-5 hours, I’ll pull it out of the fridge, and let it come up to room temp, then split it into pizza crust size balls. No measurements there. If they’re too small, the crust will be very thin. If they’re big, we get a thicker crust. It will be fine. I flatten them out on a fancy silicone pastry mat, becase they’re cheap and easier to clean than my counter. I put a bit of flour down. At this point, it’s just kind of flat. If I tried to roll it out all the way at once, it will pull back. So I let it sit kind of flat for 20 minutes, covered, then flatten some more.

Here’s where I transfer it to a greased pizza pan. I like the kind that are mesh, or have holes. I’ll turn on the oven, and leave it on the counter while I prepare the toppings. Some tomato sauce, green olives, pepperoni, and low-moisture mozzarella. Apply, and put it in the oven between 350 and 450F. While I am Canadian, our ovens speak American.

And then I have a pizza in 8 to 25 minutes, whenever it’s done. It’s done when the bottom is brown and the top is brown, and it looks like a pizza.

It’s delicious, it’s good for you, and if the dough is already in your fridge, it can come together in 20-30 minutes of effort.

The magic bit is that if you want focaccia, do all of the same thing, but leave it a bit wetter, and use olive oil for the oil. When you flatten it out, put it on a well-oiled cookie sheet instead of a pizza pan, and put some more olive oil and some flakey salt on top before baking. If you’ve got thyme or rosemary, put a bit of that in the dough when you knead it for the last time. Amazing!

If you want a loaf of bread, same thing, except put it in a loaf pan before the last rise. brush it with butter before it goes in the oven,cook it until a thermometer reads 190F when you stab it into the thick part. If you don’t have a loaf pan, make the dough a bit less wet in the early stages, and it can stand on it’s own in a dutch oven or on a cookie sheet.

Bread isn’t hard. It is complex, but you can ignore most of the complexity until you have baked it a few hundred times and you want to start getting fancy with it. A middling loaf of homemade bread fresh out of the oven is going to run laps around any factory bread in enjoyment. Go make some today. It’s cheap, it’s fun, it’s delicious, and in a world of such aggressive consumerism, making your own bread is a revolutionary act. Bring some focaccia to a potluck, it will get devoured; Make some buns for your burger or hot dog night, it elevates it to the next level; Eat pizza for lunch. It’s nutritionally a sandwich, but feels like a meal. Get fancy with it, and add more sugar, roll up some cinnamon, sugar, cardamom compound butter, and make some sticky rolls. Go watch some internet videos, but just play with it. Baking bread is fun, even when it’s bad bread, it’s still fun, then you also learned something. Where else can you get an education for three bucks?