Making Bread with the Family: A Fun Kitchen Adventure

Hi friends! I am honestly pumped to share with y’all our new little family hobby – bread-making! Yep, you read that right. Y’all know I love to cook but have never been big into baking until now. Bread making to me is its own little form of therapy. There’s something oddly enjoyable about keeping a starter alive and creating multiple loaves of fresh bread each week.

We’ve had fun gifting bread to friends and family and passing along a starter for other families to give bread-making a try. And the sweetest part is how much the kids love getting into it too!

So today, I’m going to cover what we use, the recipes we follow, and share how you can get started on your own bread making journey. 

Step-by-Step Instructions for Making Bread with the Family:

I. Gather the Ingredients:

Alright, let’s kick this off by gathering the good stuff! For a standard sourdough loaf, you’ll need about 50g of active starter from a friend (or purchase a dried version here), bread flour (I prefer to use King Arthur’s), warm water, and salt.

II. Gather the Right Tools:

You’ll need a jar for your starter, food scale, mixing bowl, bread proofing basket, bread towel or dish towel, loaf pan and dutch oven. If you don’t have a good serrated knife, it makes cutting the bread so much easier, so grab one of those as well. If you’d rather use a mixer instead of mixing by hand, the KitchenAid mixer does the trick and keeps your hands free of mess! Make sure you grab the dough attachment to get best results.

Optional: If you want to get fancy with your bread designs, you’ll want a bread scoring knife.

Easily grab every tool you’ll need for bread-making fun by checking out this post!

III. Feed Your Starter:

1. Place your empty jar on scale and weigh in grams. Write this number down on a note in your phone.
2. Add starter.
3. Weigh the jar with starter and subtract the total from the weight of your jar alone to determine how much starter you have. (Example, my jar weighs 248g, and my jar with starter weights 298g, so my starter weights 50g)
4. To feed, add 50 grams of warm water and 50 grams of bread flour and let it sit until bubbly. It’s just equal parts each time you feed it so it’ll be different each time. You just need to subtract the jar’s weight each time to get your starter weight.

IV.Mix the Dough:

Once your starter is bubbly, set your mixing bowl on the food scale. Make sure it is zeroed out and set to grams. Pour 50g starter into the mixing bowl. Then add 350g warm water, 500g bread flour, and 10g salt. Mix together.

V. First Rise:

Cover with a damp towel and set it aside for 60ish min.

VI. Stretch and Fold:

After 60 minutes, start from the outside of the ball of dough and “pinch and fold” from the outside to the center until you’ve gone all around the circle of dough. Here’s a very quick and simple video that shows how to do this.

VII. Second Rise:

Cover with a damp dish towel and set it aside for another 60ish min.

VIII. Stretch and Fold:

Go back to it and do the pinch and fold thing again. 

IX. Third (Extended) Rise:

Cover with a damp dish towel and let it rest for the 8-10 hours.

XI. Shaping the Bread:

At the end of 8-10 hours, it should have risen quite a bit. (I usually do the long rise overnight). Now you’ll flip it out onto a floured work surface (I just use our kitchen counter and sprinkle it with GF all-purpose flour). Here, you’ll shape it into a round ball. Here’s another simple video example of this step.

XII. Final Rise:

Place it seam side up into the floured proofing basket (I sprinkle the GF flour in the proofing basket, not the bread flour) and let it sit there for an hour.

XIII. Bake:

Transfer it to the Dutch oven and bake covered at 425 for 20 minutes and then uncovered for 20 minutes. If you want your crust to be firmer, you can bump your oven up to 450 and add on an additional 10 minutes at the end with the loaf sitting directly on the oven rack. We prefer softer bread in our house so we stick with 425 for 40 total minutes.

I take it out of the dutch oven right away after the second 20 minute timer is up and let it cool on a plate before slicing.

Our oldest, Ryan, loves to slice the bread and almost always calls dibs on that job. 🙂

Fun in the Kitchen with Your Kiddos:

You know what the best part is? Watching our kids have fun and take pride in our kitchen creations. 

Okay and actually eating it is pretty great too. 😉

So, who feels ready to give this a go?! Fair warning, once you start, it becomes an obsession that you’re really not made about having. And then you start baking all sorts of things with your starter discard and soon you’re wondering how realistic an edible garden and chickens in your backyard could be. Haha! But for real.

I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite recipes we’ve tried with our discard + a few we want to try!

• Soft Sandwich Bread
• Pancakes
• Waffles
• French Toast Casserole
• Banana Muffins

Happy baking, friends!