Basic white bread dough

Hi, it’s Barney from BBC Good Food and the basic technique we’re going to the bossing today is bread

We’re going to be doing a really basic bread if you’ve never made bread before, this is the recipe for you we’re going to be turning the same dough into pizza, into a basic loaf and into different type of bread rolls The ingredients we’re going to need for our bread are some strong white bread flour some salt some fast action yeast and a little bit of sugar It’s important that you use strong bread flour because plain flour has a different gluten content Plain flour is fine for things like pizzas and flatbreads, but for big loaves of bread you really want strong bread flour For one loaf or about eight rolls or four pizzas we want 500g of flour,

one sachet of yeast, now one sachet of yeast is exactly 7g, so in that goes

I like my bread to have lots of flavour, so for my basic dough I use roughly 10g of salt for 500g of flour That’s about two level teaspoons. If you like things a bit less salty you can just use one But you do need a bit of salt in your bread And just to add a touch of sweetness I’m going to add a teaspoon of white caster sugar 300ml of water will give you quite a stiff dough that’s easier to work with and 350ml will give you quite a wet dough that’s harder to work with but has bigger air bubbles in it I’m going to go somewhere inbetween, I’m going to make a dough with 320-325ml of water which is out recipe for basic bread rolls So I just need to add that

Now we’re going to mix our dough. Now you can use a wooden spoon for this or a spatular But i like to get my hands in It’s just a matter of mixing the dough together, we’re not worried about kneading it at this stage we’re just trying to get all the ingredients mixed together, then we’re going to leave it for about ten minutes I’m going to get my hands straight in there and just mix

Now we’ve just got ourselves a rough dough and this bit isn’t essential, but I like to just leave the dough for ten to fifteen minutes it activates the yeast, hydrates the flour and let’s the ingredients just kind of get to know each other I tend to just leave that in the bowl and the cover it with a damp tea towel and it’s just a case of walking away and leaving that for ten to fifteen minutes So our dough has had ten minutes and you can start to see it’s already started to soften just by leaving it for ten minutes and now we are going to knead it Now, unless you’re the Incredible Hulk it’s impossible to over knead by hand where most people go wrong is they add loads of flour to the surface, changing the recipe So we’re not even going to flour the surface You can add just a little flour if you’re nervous but I’m going to add just a drizzle of oil and then it’s a matter of good old elbow grease for the next ten minutes or so To knead, the classic method is to stretch and bring the dough back round on itself You can just slap the dough around a bit and then bring it back round on itself, like so But what we’re trying to do is stretch the gluten in the dough I tend to set my timer and give it a good ten minutes Our dough had been kneaded for ten minutes and we know it’s ready because when we get it into a ball and press it, it springs back so look- stretchy means it’s elastic and means it’s good to go We’re going to pop that in a bowl, add about a teaspoon of oil into our bowl Our dough goes into the bowl and then we leave that for an hour or so, or until it’s doubled in size Cover that with a tea towel and we’re going to leave that for around an hour Thats what it looks like in our bowl, that’s the one we’re going to cover- the one we’re going to see later and this is the one we’re going to be working with The first thing we’re going to make is a basic white loaf, and our dough just goes onto our surface it’s absolutely fine to add a little bit of flour now and we’re going to knock the air out of it a bit You could put this in a loaf tin but if you don’t have a loaf tin I’m going to show you how to make a nice rounded loaf You want to just bring that back round onto itself and put it onto a floured baking tray and we’re going to pop that somewhere to double in size and that’s going to take around forty minutes It makes about eight small rolls or six larger rolls, you can turn them into burger buns or hot dog rolls but the easiest way to divide the dough if you don’t want to measure each one is to make it into a sausage like this, let’s make this one into six, shall we?

That’s about even I’ve got a bench knife but you can use any knife and we’re going to cut about halfway and each one you just have to cut into about three If you want you can weigh them out to make sure they’re the same weight For simple bread rolls we just roll them into balls like this, and that’s our simple break roll And for a hot dog bun you want to do that a bit longer, just roll it onto itself and it’s just a matter of rolling it like this For burger buns you probably want them a bit bigger than that one so we’ll take one and a half pieces of dough and you want them just a bit flatter, like this and that’s going to make a nice burger bun We can try doing a mini baguette, just roll that out into a sausage shape So again, we’re just going to have a damp towel over that and we’ll leave those for about forty minutes For pizza, very similar to our rolls, we’re just going to knock our dough around a little bit just to knock the air out of it ever so slightly, and we’re going to cut it into four Like so and just as if we were making big rolls, we’re just going to roll each one into a nice round and each one of these is going to be a decent sized pizza, so that’s four pizzas out of the mix Just like we were doing with the rolls before we’re just going to roll them into tight balls dust that tray with flour, and these are going to be our four pizzas which we’ll leave until doubled in size So there we have basic bread, bread rolls, pizza dough First up, our bread rolls.

They have had about forty minutes, they’ve all doubled in size this is our burger bun so we’re going to glaze it with a bit of egg and then dust it with a few sesame seeds, like so we’re going to leave this one and this one as is and split this one down the middle and dust them with a bit of flour It’s not essential, just nice as they cook. We’ll split this one down the middle with a sharp knife and that will split open as it cooks We’re going to pop those in the oven.

Our oven temperature is 210C fan or about 230C, gas mark 8 For this one, nothing more than a dusting of flour and we’ll do a couple of slices along there like that and they’re just going to open up as it cooks And again, that goes in our oven, that will take a bit longer, about 35 to 40 minutes Now on to our pizza dough You can roll it with a rolling pin but you get a much nicer pizza if you use your fingers to stretch the dough out that’s how you get the nice crust to it Stretching the dough, try not to tear it I’ve just got some tomato passata which I’ve seasoned with a bit of olive oil and some salt and pepper We’re just going to do a classic margherita, with cubes of mozzarella, but you can use any cheese you want Cheddar works well but mozzarella is authentic add a small drizzle of olive oil and that’s going to go in a really hot oven for about 12 minutes and then we’ll have a very basic pizza Like all pizza you can top them with whatever you like So we have our bloomer loaf our bread rolls and you know bread is cooked when you tap it on the base and it sounds hollow and we have our pizza all cooked from the same basic bread dough This has been boss the basics, I’m Barney, thanks ever so much for watching