Ratio 100% Bread Flour 70% Water 5% Sugar 5% EVOO 2% Salt 1.3% Instant Yeast .3% Basil .3% Oregano .3% Thyme
You’ll also need somewhere between a 1/4 cup and 1/2 cup extra Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and some Course Sea Salt!
This is not for a bread machine but I used my Kitchenaid Mixer and a normal oven. This formula fills a half size sheet pan fairly well as you can see below (18in x 13in). So if you have a 13in x 9in pan all you have to do is cut this formula in half!
I just throw all the ingredients in the mixing bowl of my mixer and let it knead for about 10-15 minutes. After all the ingredients have kind of come together I bump the speed up on my mixer to 4, I know the manual says not to go above 2 to knead dough but it doesn’t seem to knead it well if I don’t bump the speed up. That said, do this at your own risk as it could damage the mixer!
Next up is just waiting! I put the dough in a large plastic container that is covered somehow, 6 quarts or larger I believe, oil it up and then let the dough rise in a warmer place. Personally I turn the oven on for about 20 seconds and then turn it off and also leave the light on inside the oven to help keep the oven warm. I will let it rise until about doubled in size, depending on how warm it is in the oven it could be 45 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes, potentially shorter or longer.
After it has about doubled in size I take it out of my container and plop it onto my baking sheet. I flatten it out over the whole sheet pan and then cover it again and let it rise until around doubled in size.
I preheat the oven to around 375 F and get the bread ready to bake. I deflate it by poking my fingers straight down into the dough to produce little pockets in it. Then I’ll take the EVOO, that 1/4 to 1/2 cup and dump it all over top. I bake it for 20 minutes or so, the time can vary a lot and all you can do is keep a close eye on it until you get a good idea how your oven will bake it. After it comes out of the oven I will wait about 20-30 seconds and then sprinkle the Course Sea Salt on top! Then just let it cool off and enjoy 🙂
Add the ingredients in the order that your bread machine suggests, my Oster says to do wet and then dry ingredients. I then chose the 1.5LB setting, french bread and medium crust settings. The formula percentages are approximate as I do not have a scale that is very precise!
This is how the bread turned out, as you can see it wasn’t exactly uniform but not having to do anything to it other than put the ingredients in was very nice! I cut some slices about 30 minutes after the bread came out of the oven and if you look closely at the cutting board there’s a fair amount of crumbs from the crust that came off. The crust isn’t quite like an artisan hard crusted loaf that my wife and I really like but it is still very good.
The crumb turned out nice, outside of the little air pocket. Otherwise it was good! My wife and I certainly enjoyed the bread and ate about half of it in one sitting and then basically finished it off making grilled cheese sandwiches with the rest.
I would definitely recommend trying this out! Please let me know in the comments if you like it or if you’ve tried something else and really liked it! 🙂
Some Background:
I originally started making bread dough using cups and tablespoons for measuring ingredients but found out formula’s seemed to be the way to go according to some online communities. It just so happened I also had bought a kitchen scale called an EatSmart (for dieting purposes) around this time and decided to try it using it for weighing my ingredients. Since that time I have not looked back! I find weighing the ingredients to be pretty quick and it allows me to get the exact same bread every time very easily. Also using the formula method I could change the size of a batch of dough easily to make a properly sized loaf of bread in my pan(s).
Baking bread has been a hobby of mine for the past 5+ years. Although some of my friends may have called it a bit more than a hobby as I had an industrial size convection oven as well as a 20qt Hobart mixer and an industrial bread slicer… and used to make 20-24 loaves over a 4 to 5 hour period. One thing I enjoyed about baking was experimentation with my formula’s. I tried a number of different things until I found a few different recipes that everyone seemed to enjoy the most. Due to starting to make larger batches of do I no longer used the scale linked above and used a different one I found on Amazon that has a much higher max weight. I think it would go up to around 22 pounds but the precision wasn’t as good. It only counts in 2 grams instead of every gram like the older one. If you are interested in checking it out, here’s a link to the Salter Scale. Overall I’m happy with the scale but it was rather expensive but it was great when I would put enough flour in to make 12 loaves of bread at a time!
This equipment setup was at my parents house, where I lived, but I have gotten married and have moved out! The apartment my wife and I moved into is not big enough to accommodate all of that equipment as most of you could probably guess. The fact that I didn’t have access to this equipment didn’t remove my desire to bake bread though! After more than 6 months of being married and being too busy with work and life to bake bread more than a couple times I decided to try out a bread machine. Low and behold around this time Amazon Prime day came around, which is both good and bad as I spent money but I bought a couple neat gadgets! So I bought a 2LB Oster bread machine, part number CKSTBRTW20-NP that no longer appears to be on Amazon. There only appears to be one Oster bread machine listed on Amazon now which I’ll link here. Apparently they wanted to get rid of the inventory of the old one!
Update 11/3/18 – So apparently I made this post during a short period of time that Amazon didn’t have the bread machine I bought listed… but it’s back so here it is!
At this point I use the bread machine either weekly or biweekly which is a lot better than making a loaf of bread once every 2 or 3 months. I still have a lot of experimentation to do with formula’s in the bread machine. A favorite formula before I got the bread machine that everyone seemed to like the most only involved 4 ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast. I have not found anyone saying to make a loaf of bread in a bread machine like this but I am going to try it next time so we can take this journey together! The formula in this post is similar because of how little fat and sugar are in the dough but it won’t be quite the same. I imagine part of the reason I haven’t found a bread machine recipe is the temperature of the bread machine probably isn’t as high as when I would bake the simple recipe in the oven. I would put the dough in a Dutch Oven and would start out the baking process at 425f with the lid on.
I do plan to eventually write up a review on this bread machine but I wanted to start getting a few formulas with pictures up and get some more bread made in it before I made an official review 🙂
