Amish Bread

For Christmas dinner, the night before I went to the hospital to deliver the cub, we had a friend over and had a nice, smallish, homemade meal. We made salmon, broccoli-cheese soup, deviled eggs, and mini cheesecakes. We also made this "Amish white bread" with the kids. It's straight-forward, fun, doesn't require a bread machine and it's actually quite delicious; a great first bread recipe for kids. The flavor, consistency and crust would lend itself well to making a bread bowl, in fact.

Amish White Bread

Serves 2 9x5 loaves

Total time 2.5 hours including rise time

Prep time 2 hours including rise time

Ingredients

2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)

2/3 cup white sugar

1 1/2 tbsp active dry yeast

1 1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup vegetable oil

6 cups bread flour

Instructions

Dissolve sugar in warm water, then mix in yeast. Let sit until yeast creates a froth on the surface of the water. This takes a few minutes. I used this time to talk to my kids about yeast as a living organism, and that it eats the sugar, etc.

Mix salt and oil in to the frothy yeast water.

Add flour, one cup at a time. I used 5 cups of flour in the bowl, then used the rest to flour my table to knead the dough. In the process of kneading the dough, a lot of that 6th cup gets incorporated. 

Knead dough until smooth. I let the kids do a lot of this. They had fun, punching, poking and otherwise abusing it.

Place dough mass into a well oiled bowl and roll to oil surface of dough.

Cover dough mass with a damp cloth and let rise for about 1 hour. It should double in size.

Punch dough down and knead for a few minutes. Divide in half and form into loaves (or balls if you want to make bread bowls).

Place into well-oiled, 9x5 bread pans. The bread ball in the picture at the top was baked directly on an oiled cookie sheet.

Allow to rise for 30 more minutes. Bread mass supposedly should expand to about 1 inch above the top of the bread pan. Mine did not, but it turned out fine.

Bake at 350 degrees F/175 degrees C for 30 minutes.