The Household Daily Bread Recipe (PM’s Version)

We’ve been baking our own bread with increasing frequency since about 2011, initially as a change from buying it, then as an alternative to buying it, until nowadays actually buying bread – at least plain ordinary bread – hardly happens at all. In addition, since a lot of commercial bakeries have taken to adding add soya flour which upsets Diane’s IBS, baking our own means we know exactly what’s going into it.

Breadmaking is made even easier thanks to a couple of Very Useful kitchen appliances.

One is our Magimix food processor, which with its dough blade in place transforms loose ingredients into well-kneaded dough in about two minutes. This means that even though it isn’t big enough to handle doubled quantities, it can still prepare two batches fast enough that there’s no need to factor in any difference in rising time.

As for that rising time, our combi microwave has a dough-raise setting which reduces the usual doubled-in-size rise from about two hours to about 45 minutes.

These quoted times can vary depending on weather, humidity and for all I know the phase of the moon, but on average, going from flour in the jar to finished loaves on the cooling rack can take less than three hours.

The recipe started out as one Diane found on the now-defunct website of a now-closed bakery in Switzerland, which she’ll post separately. It began as Tessinerbrot / pane ticinese – bread from Canton Ticino – but after much adaptation, tweaking and simplification of times and ingredients it’s become its own thing, Wicklauerbrot – bread from County Wicklow – an everyday general-purpose white loaf for toast and sandwiches.

I make two loaves about twice or maybe three times a week. The bread gets stored in a bag and wooden bin, gets eaten fast enough that it doesn’t go stale and, because of that, it’s more economical to bake two at a time.

This recipe is designed to fill one of the high-sided bread pans DD describes in this post. It can either be baked without the loaf pan’s lid, for a domed top crust, or with the lid on, to produce a square-sided sandwich loaf.

See the “Recipe” tab above for the details.