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 🙂
I will attempt to be better about updating this blog. I would like to post something weekly going forward but we will see how things work out. While we have a number of other things we would like to get up on here we will start with something we did just Labor Day Weekend!
Over the Labor Day holiday weekend Jess and I went out to Pittsburgh for Jess’s birthday. Jess has never been there and I have only been out there for work (driving a truck) so I haven’t been able to enjoy the city. We didn’t have much of a plan for the couple days we would be there outside of checking out the rib fest. We were hoping the rib fest took place inside Heinz Field stadium, which is where the Steelers play. Jess is a Steelers fan and I like them though they’re not my favorite team (that would be the New York Giants!) anyway, all that said it turns out the rib fest is outside of stadium!
They have a whole slew of different stands. Each place has won a whole lot of rewards so it’s a matter of finding one that has a style of BBQ sauce that you like. A lot of the businesses come from out of state. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we got any pictures of this part of the trip. There was a fair amount of people there, which is expected, though unless we missed an area set up to eat at there wasn’t much in the way of room to sit down and eat. That would be my main criticism of the event, unless we missed a seating area. That said I would still recommend checking it out sometime if you’re around the city Labor day weekend!
One of the other things we did was check out the Duquesne Incline which was quite neat! The incline itself is interesting though you could drive up to Mount Washington for the view (shown below) of Pittsburgh if you would prefer not to spend the money for the ride up. So you’re paying for the experience of going up and down on it, so remember that and enjoy it if you do use it!
Such a beautiful city!And even more beautiful at night!
We also went to Kniess’ Miniature Golf (Facebook page here)just that is just North of the North Shore and Downtown Pittsburgh. We were there at night and didn’t take many photos again. I suppose that is something we will have to get better at! They have 2 different courses there, both 18 holes. If I remember correctly the one is called the Classic course and the other is the Creek Course. We did the non-classic course which has a lot of fun obstacles and is not like any other mini-golf course Jess or I have done. Not every but most of the holes have something instead of 2 or 3 having a moving obstacle. As an aside, Google says it has a botanical garden planted in and among the course which may be partly true. Depending on how you define that anyway, the only real flower garden I’ve been to is the Hershey Gardens which I suppose is not fair to compare the two. It is a very nice and fun time though! Definitely worthwhile to check out if you’re in the area!
The last thing we did was go to the Carnegie Science Center which was quite enjoyable as adults even if it is a bit more geared for children. Price wise isn’t terrible but it will add up quick especially if you have a child or two that you’re taking as well. While I don’t want to spoil things there I did want to put up a picture of two of the Miniature Railroad and Village, neither of us knew it was there but it is very impressive! There’s so much detail and time that went into making it.
They even have lights on the ferris wheel!For those into planes.Old style town!
Well, I think that will be all for this post. Like I said above I’m going to try to update this blog more often, the next post may be a review of a product. Perhaps an Ice Cream Maker. Thank you for reading and if you have any requests or tips or comments please say something!
My wife (Jess) and I (Josh) have talked about starting a blog to talk about pretty much anything and everything and I finally got something up and running. We live and work in Central Pennsylvania, we currently have no plans to leave the area but who knows what the future will hold!
Some of the things you can expect to see will involve reviewing or talking about areas we go to on vacation, products we happen to buy and use, Biblical topics, and possibly in the future a podcast and or YouTube videos. As we move along we’ll see if there’s anything else we want to add or perhaps stop doing.
Currently Jess is in Rainelle, West Viriginia with the Youth Group from Ono United Methodist Church helping to fix up certain things in the town that were damaged in some major flooding that occurred in the spring of 2016. So when she gets back I will have her post something about that and some pictures I hope!
