[shygirl]

 

[Greenerlife]

Excellent!  Practise makes perfect!

[animalcrackers]

Well  Done! I find the key to good quality bread is the best flour you can  and always use oil and not  butter. It is also really important to not have the mixture to dry with wholemeal i always use a bit more water than recommended. Have you ever tried wessex mill flour it is superb.

[shygirl]

any tips for flavour? - our palette is used to supermarket bread so although the texture and appearance was lovely, it had an odd flavour.

[Bionic]

Well done that you got a reasonable loaf. 
What sort of worksurface are you kneading on?  I ask because the man who did our kitchen tiles was a baker for 20 years. I was making bread on my granite worksurface and he said that would always be too cold. Since I have started kneading on the wooden worktop the outcome has been much better.
 
Granite for pastry (it likes the cold) wood for bread as the cold stops the yeast from rising

[Fleecewife]

Well  Done! I find the key to good quality bread is the best flour you can  and always use oil and not  butter. It is also really important to not have the mixture to dry with wholemeal i always use a bit more water than recommended. Have you ever tried wessex mill flour it is superb.

Seconded    for Wessex Mill flour, and using the best you can find.
 
Other good millers are Marriages, Doves Farm and Allinsons.
 
For the different taste of homemade bread - you will soon come to love it and wonder how you had eaten so much cotton wool for so long       For a really different taste, try sourdough bread.   I find it complicated to make but you can buy it - the Co-op here sells it.
 
 
Good tip about kneading on a wooden surface Bionic.   Way back when my OH was in the RAF, every married quarter included a huge wooden kneading board in the kitchen utensils.  I think most folk thought they were archaic but mine was used every couple of days.
 
 

[Padge]

I use Shipton Mill Flour which I find to make the best bread....although our friend in the village uses Lidl bread flour and a breadmaker and makes a fantastically light loaf
I use a non stick board for kneading

[shygirl]

we are using a wooden surface to knead. we are trying different flours at moment.
the loaf stayed fresh for ages too but i just couldnt stand the flavour. shame

[Bionic]

Strange about the flavour. Did you add any flavoured ingredients to it?

[shygirl]

no, i dont think i used enough salt. maybe there was too much yeast as i only have big scales, it hard to be accurate with tiny amounts. it was also brownish in colour even though we used morrisons strong white flour.
digital scales are maybe in order.
we will try again, but first my daughter wants to make pizza dough......how come all this home cooking is never diet food? bread, pizza, icecream 
 

[MikeM]

I use spoon measures for small amounts, so a 2lb loaf gets 2 t spoons of salt and 2 of a yeast with 1 of sugar for the yeast starter.
One thing to bear in mind, homemade bread will taste different, and stronger, than shop bread, simply cos it's got more flour in it. Most store bread is fresh air, which is pretty tasteless.

[Bionic]

Yes, it does sound like you need some digital scales but I also do as Mike has said i.e. use spoon measures for the small amounts and it works out fine

[Louise Gaunt]

Bread needs salt to help it stay risen, I use 1.5 level teaspoons per 1kg of flour. It is also useful to put either ice cubes or water in a tray in the bottom of the oven when baking. The steam allows the bread to rise in the heat before the crust sets. Careful when opening the oven though, as there will be clouds of steam come out.

[ladyK]

Well done for the fluffy loaf! 

I actually find that adding double the salt amount of any bread recipe makes it a lot tastier. I admit I am a bit of a savoury junky (I can;t stand sweets) so maybe you want to experiment with adding extra salt in samll increments, e.g. if the suggested amount is 2 tsp, try 2.5 or 3 tsp next time.

I agree with FW, though: sourdough bread tastes the best by far! It's not really that difficiult to make, but quite 'fiddly' as you need to plan for several extra steps.

The best bread  book I have come across is the River Cottage bread handbook. It has a great first section explaining exactly what happens in each step of breadmaking, what reacts with what to result in what, so you get a proper understanding of your own about how it works, which then allows you to work out better what went wrong when it does.