All Recipes
Easiest Crusty Homemade Bread
When feeding a growing family, it’s so helpful to have a delicious easy homemade bread recipe in your pocket. Years ago, I found this bulk dough method on the internet. It’s a very common way of having bread dough ready to bake when you need it. I’m sharing here, not because I came up with this method, but because I use this as a starting place for many meals and recipes of my own. In the future, I’ll reference this as the basic white dough recipe. This is no homemade deliciously cultured sourdough, but it has blessed my family and friends with warm bread for many meals over the years. I don’t have time or capacity for sourdough in this season, but hope to someday! For now, I’ll keep relying on this solid recipe for warm bread in the house.
Ingredients
-6 cups of warm water around 100 degrees
-3 tablespoons of kosher salt
-3 tablespoons of active dry yeast
-13 cups of flour (I do use bread flour, but All Purpose would work fine too)
DIRECTIONS
1. Get a really big bowl or deep container. Add water, yeast, and salt.
2. Add flour, measuring by scoop and leveling.
3. Stir ingredients together well, don’t knead the dough, you’re really just looking to incorporate the water and flour well into a shaggy dough. I often feel more confident mixing with my hands, if you do this, wet your hands well with cold water to avoid it all sticking to you.
4. Once incorporated, cover loosely, let sit on counter for 2 hours. After that initial rise, you can immediately break off some dough and bake or store in the fridge until you want to bake next. Up to two weeks!
To bake a loaf I’ve found that I prefer to use my Dutch oven. It’s a totally foolproof method of gaining that crusty exterior country loaf, while having a lovely inner spring.
1. Preheat oven to 450f with your Dutch oven preheating inside it. Take your desired amount of dough out of bowl. (I usually do a very large grapefruit size, around 1.3-1.5lbs) Shape the dough on a lightly floured surface.
Let rise on a cormeal dusted or lightly floured parchment paper or pizza peel if you have one. (I don’t;) while you do something else. Only a 20-30 min rise.
2. Once oven is preheated, slide your parchment paper and loaf onto the preheated surface. If baking on a stone, use a pan underneath to put some water in and cause it to steam right when you put the bread in. Omit this part if using a Dutch oven. On stone, bake loaves around 20-30 min until medium to dark brown crust. Let cool long enough to slice and enjoy. For the Dutch oven, bake 20 min, remove lid and finish bake for another 15-20 min. Or until you can see a deep golden crust.
