Stop Wasting Bread: The Perfect Small Batch Loaf

If you love to make fresh bread but hate how much of it goes to waste, then this is for you. I'm Gemma Stafford a pastry chef with over 20 years experience and this is the bread I bake at my house to feed my small family. We're going to make one simple dough and bake a single loaf so you get fresh bakery style bread without the waste. Now I am all about a no-knead dough and I have many different ones on my website because you don't need a machine you mix it all by hand and you just use time to knead your dough and help the gluten strengthen and form. For my bread I use bread flour and the reason I do that is because it's higher in gluten so it gives you extra stretch, extra chewy bite and also is better at capturing bubbles in your bread than all-purpose flour is. So bread flour is a really fantastic thing to have on hand when you're making little breads like this. Because it's a small batch bread we only need a small amount of flour. Into our flour we're going to add a small amount of salt. Every loaf of bread no matter how big or small needs a decent amount of salt otherwise it can actually be quite flat tasting. So into this we're going to add in our yeast it's a yeasted dough so what I like to do is instant yeast because instant yeast can go straight into your flour just like any other ingredient. It's really simple and if you're not used to using a lot of yeast in your baking go for instant yeast. I'll tell you why. Active dried yeast which is different type of yeast you do have to use a different quantity but you also have to activate it in warm water so you have to go to that extra step where instant yeast just goes straight in there and does its thing. I have a note on BiggerBolderBaking.com with this recipe about how to use the different yeasts. Give that a little mixy mix, lovely. So for our liquid we have here some warm water or what I say is blood temperature water and somebody asked me recently what do you mean by blood temperature or lukewarm water and this is what I mean. I heat it up in the microwave or in the kettle. When I put my finger into the water if I can't feel the water around my finger it means it's a similar temperature to my blood which is perfect for yeast to feed on, yeast to activate and for yeast to grow and thrive so you want a little bit warmer. Because we're making this dough all in the one day and it's not like a slow proof over time we do want to give our yeast a little bit of a helping hand with lukewarm water. Into the water another thing that helps feed the yeast is honey, look at that. Yeast is a living thing it thrives on warmth it needs to be fed and one thing it loves is sugar so a little bit of liquid sugar in there makes yeast very happy and also the presence of sugar in a dough you can actually see on the surface of your bread it kind of creates these little bubbles all around the crust of your bread making it look really beautiful. There we go mix those two together then wet into dry so once the wet hits the dry even if you look into my bowl here you can see the yeast is already activating and with the helping hand of that warm water it means that we can make this loaf all in one day and the yeast will have everything it needs. With a spatula I like to mix this together you can also use your hand just mix it until all the flour is hydrated and we have a ball of dough. So I'm going to proof it in this bowl and sometimes what I like to do is just grease the bowl a little bit like I said yeast is a living thing and while it's proofing and activating you want to make sure that it has an easy time gliding off the side of your bowl and if you put a small bit of oil in there it will really just help your dough along. I do it both ways sometimes I use oil sometimes I don't. Okie dokie on with our lid we're going to set this dough aside at room temperature to proof for around two hours. So because this is only a small loaf enough for you know two people or so the little dough doesn't take that long to proof so two hours is perfect. Now if you want to keep it and put it in the fridge after the two hours feel free to do that up to two days and the more time you give a dough any type of dough the more flavor develops the texture will be better it'll get stronger it'll be more bubblier so if you do have the extra time you know experiment a little bit that's what I do sometimes I bake it a day off sometimes I give it a day or two in the fridge and you will notice the difference sometimes when you don't have a lot of time and you do want a freshly baked loaf of bread then the two hours is perfect. As you can see it has doubled in size see all those air pockets there that is the gluten forming do you see that in here so this is why we didn't have to knead on a machine because time is a beautiful thing and in the bowl the gluten developed the yeast went to work and the gluten has strengthened giving us those lovely gluten strands and even those two hours rather than just mixing on a machine those two hours give you improved flavor than an average dough made on a machine so I am all about no knead doughs. Now flour your surface a little bit turn out your dough here's what we're going to do we're going to pull and fold and this is another step that you're kneading yourself but not on a machine it's not the traditional way and so what we're going to do is just pull the dough fold it over itself and pull it we're knocking out the air remember all those bread recipes that we did that said knock out the air never really told us why I thought when I was a novice baker that you were knocking out the air on all the bubbles and that you shouldn't do that I couldn't understand why and years and years of being a bread baker working professionally as a bread baker knocking out the air and pulling and stretching the dough strengthens the dough and what it allows because your dough is now stronger it can catch more bubbles if it's not a strong dough it can't hold those big lovely bubbles that we see in fermented doughs so pull and fold it's simple it's not complicated pull it fold it pull it fold it there's no fancy technique do as many pulls and folds as you can until your dough just won't pull and fold anymore you'll get to that point create a little boule number one if you wanted to bake this in a loaf pan you could in a small loaf pan so what you want to do is use the table you're working on when you are trying to shape a dough you actually want very little flour you want the dough to adhere to the counter a little bit of flour on my hands work the dough by pushing it into the counter a little bit and it bounces back in your hands and creates this perfectly round boule and you know you've done a good job that when you turn it over there's very little seam my secret weapon not so secret because everybody does it baking my bread in a dutch oven i have a piece of parchment here i'm going to lift up my boule i like to proof in my dutch oven some people use baskets whatever works for you i find this is more straightforward and less of a step so what i'm going to do now put on the lid leave it at room temperature for an hour let it double in size and we'll come back we'll check if it's proofed if it is we'll score it into the oven then so now i think i heard a few people say what if i don't have a dutch oven it's kind of like my superpower here's what to do i did this for many years before i had a dutch oven and it works beautifully you can use a good quality tray a nice like heavy tray you'll put this into the oven you can slide on your proof dough if it's and cover with a metal bowl by doing that the bowl is creating steam between the tray and the bread and you still get that great effect you still get that chewy crust you still get that pop in the bread so this is a great solution but i do have to tell you you can't use any type of metal please make sure the bowl that you use is high quality stainless steel grade 304 316 or 430 very important otherwise your bowl will warp in the oven so it has been around an hour our dough has proofed i think that has definitely doubled in size so a question i get a lot is how do you know if a dough is proofed regardless of the size and there is one telltale sign i'm going to put some flour on my finger poke your dough if your indentation stays in the dough it means it's proofed if the dough pops back under your finger it's not ready it needs more time to proof put the lid back on be patient once you know it's ready let's get it into the oven what i like to do because this is like a bakery style bread i do like to dust the top with a little bit of flour and i'll tell you another reason why i do that it gives you a lovely look but also it makes it easier to score i'm not the best bread scorer so i just find it easier so i use a stanley knife this is what i've always done and i'm going to do just three slits into the bread somebody asked me the other day i actually think it was george my son why do you score bread so the reason you score bread the main reason is actually not for look the main reason is that it's going to create steam in the loaf when it's baking you need to give that steam a vent to escape from so any scoring that you do will be a vent for steam to escape if you do not score your bread at all you will get this kind of blown outside of your loaf or even on the top of the loaf it doesn't look bad it looks very homemade but um that is the steam trying to escape when it wasn't given the space to do so so do a nice score it helps the steam escape and it makes your bread look good so the benefits of baking bread in a dutch oven is just really spectacular because what it does is creates this like oven a really hot oven to put your dough into you put on the lid and when you put on the lid it which helps to rise your loaf and it also gives your loaf a chewy outer crust so it's really really fantastic way to bake just a little thrifty tip definitely if you're looking for a dutch oven check out tj maxx check out marshall's even ross you can get some really good quality ones for really cheap this is ready for the oven lid on oven preheated let's go so we're going to start in a very hot oven 425 degrees fahrenheit for 20 minutes lid on after 20 minutes lid off turn down the temperature to 400 degrees fahrenheit and then let it bake for the remaining 20 minutes or so until it's really lovely golden brown while it is baking i'm going to do some bold baking hotline questions and this is great around bread because lots of people have different experience with bread and i want to make sure that we're all able to like make doughs use yeast and all that stuff so somebody asked can i double this recipe yes you can double the recipe then it's a full loaf of bread and i have lots of full loaves of bread on my website or you could just double this recipe this is perfect we are a family of three this is the bread that we will go through with no waste even with one person this is the perfect loaf for you now the next question was a great one can i freeze the dough raw i would say no to that don't freeze raw yeast and dough because often what happens is you do not get the exact same dough defrosted and baked you just will not get the same results so i would recommend baking your bread slicing it and freezing it or just freeze the whole loaf but don't freeze the raw dough last but not least somebody asks can i add whole wheat flour and that's a great question the answer is yes my rule of thumb is half half white half whole wheat do not do 100 whole wheat your dough will be very heavy and stodgy and probably inedible so half white half whole wheat and on that note if you wanted to add in a few seeds maybe raisins and some nuts whatever you want you can scatter a few in there no problem it's quite a versatile dough so on that note i think the timer went off i want to take off the lid and let the steam come out so when your loaf comes out it's a beautiful golden brown just like this one and it has kind of that shine on it because of the steam we created by putting on the lid so it really does all those little elements really make a difference now this is very hot i'm digging my life into my own hands but listen to this that is music to my ears 20 minutes with steam gives you a shiny crust and a chewy crust then time baking with the lid off gives you that dry crust the longer you have the lid off the thicker the crust i do around 20-25 minutes and you get the best of both worlds i'm gonna stop balling the bread now i'm gonna let it cool down because when it's cooled that's when we can slice it the reason i love this loaf is because it's the perfect amount of bread for my small family of three it's only made with five ingredients it takes a couple of hours and in the end you get the most beautiful cutest little loaf of bread that really is full of flavor and when you slice the bread you see the air bubbles that were created over the no process and in the end you get the most beautiful cutest little loaf of bread that really is full of flavor so not only does it have lovely flavor but great texture too i really hope you enjoyed this small batch recipe and if you want more videos and get comfy i've got hundreds for you to check out thanks so much for watching i'll see you back here again really soon