There is nothing like eating fresh bread for breakfast every morning. However, many people just consider buying their bread because of the time and effort it takes to bake one yourself. But what if we told you that you can now bake your own bread in the comforts of your home and take a healthy breakfast to an all new level? Baking your own bread gives you greater control over the ingredients and you can mix and match the types of bread you would like to have with your meals.
With the advent of technology, it has now become possible to effortlessly bake your own bread at home, each morning! There are plenty of bread making machines these days that make it easy for you to bake your bread effortlessly. In fact, the home baked breads turn out so cheap that your bread maker practically pays for itself.
If you are wondering how these bread makers really work and how they are beneficial for you, then read on.
Steps to Bake Bread
Bread has been around for hundreds of years and still continues to be a breakfast staple. Just think of all the breads you can bake at your own convenience when you have an appliance that does it for you with a click of a button. However, back in the day, baking your own bread used to be a time consuming process that brought the bakers into business. The bread making process may have been automated, but it still follows these basic five steps in its preparation:
- The first step involves mixing the flour, water, sugar, salt, yeast and butter and making a dough.
- Once the dough is prepared, you have to beat it to make it stretchy. This can be done with kneading. Unless you knead, your dough will not rise and will not taste as well as the one that you buy from your baker.
- Leave your dough in a warm place and let it sit for at least an hour or two until it rises. As you leave the dough, the yeast does its work and makes the dough grow twice its size.
- While this is when the dough is ready to bake, the bakers suggest that you should let it rise again to make a consistent loaf of bread. You can bash the dough again and remove all the air from it, also known as knocking down. Then you leave the dough for some more time to rise again. This process is called proving.
- After this step, your dough is ready to bake. Just place it in a tin and put it in an oven.
How a bread maker works?
What we described above is a traditional way of baking bread. However, your bread maker will do all that for you in a machine while you prepare other things for breakfast. A bread maker is an automatic and compact oven that can hold a large tin of dough to give you a load of bread. The tin in the bread maker comes with an axle that connects it to an electric outlet underneath that does all the work for you. Since this axle is fixed with a waterproof seal, you can rest assured that your bread mixture will stay put. A small paddle is used to fix the tin with the axle.
You first put the paddle in the tin and then measure all the ingredients that you require for your bread. Insert this tin into the bread maker. Once it has been loaded, all you need to do is find the appropriate settings suitable for the bread you are making, close the lid on the machine and let it do its job. Most bread makers come with a glass lid that allow you to watch the process.
The moment you start the machine, the first thing you notice is the whirring sound of the machine that is made by paddles spinning around as they knead the dough. As the dough rises after kneading, your machine will silently work its way through the second phase. Then you hear another round of whirring and then quiet again as the machine goes into proving mode. The last thing you will see is the oven switching on and steam release from the machine. In that moment, the sweet smell of freshly baked bread will waft through the machine. This is the indication that your bread has been prepared. Leave it inside for a few minutes before you take it out. Cut the loaf with a serrated knife and serve immediately to enjoy soft aromatic bread.