No Sugar Added

Today I woke up with a mission: Bake my own bread. Here’s what I did:

1. Mixed warm water, sugar, and active dry yeasts together in a bowl. Let these cats get acquainted for ten minutes.
2. Stirred in some butter, salt, and a bunch of white flour till I got a massive clump of dough.
3. Let that clump sit for a few minutes. Looked up “kneading” on Wikipedia. Tried to knead it for 10.
4. Left the kneaded clump of dough in a greased up bowl.
5. Went to the gym. I’m concentrating on hamstring flexibility and building up my shoulders and upper back these days. I got called out by a friend who works at the gym for checking out a medicine ball and then taking it into the locker room with me, but sometimes you gotta protect what’s yours from usurpers.
6. The dough was real swelled up when I returned home. Niice.
7. Put the dough into the baking pan and punched it down. (Can you tell what’s missing from this step?)
8. Blazed the bread in the oven on 420 degrees for 15 minutes, then curbed the temp down to 350 for another 20.

I was duly impressed with myself when out of the oven came something looking suspiciously like a loaf of bread. However, there were a few minor differences. One, the loaf was hopelessly stuck to the baking pan. I slapped my forehead. Two, the bread, once surgically extracted from the jaws of the pan, was a bit too dense and spongy, like wack biscuits. Google suggests this texture is a result of insufficient kneading. Nevertheless, my bread was pretty tasty with some hot, homemade butter.

Recipe Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups flour (I used all-purpose King Arthur’s because it has fewer additives).
• 1 1/2 cups of water
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp butter