Ah, bread. Just like Oprah, "I LOVE BREAD!" Bread has been one of the most important foods through most of history, since man discovered they could grind wheat, combine it with water and some yeast from their fermented grapes, and bake it into a loaf. Bread has come a long way since then, and there are so many different kinds and styles. Most people view baking bread as an art. Rightfully so, baking bread is not as simple as mixing together some ingredients and baking it. It's time consuming, hard work to make a loaf of bread. Even with all of this, there is nothing like a slice of toasted homemade bread slathered in butter to start off your day, or end it in my case. And once you have a basic understanding of how to make bread, then you can bake any kind of bread.

Unlike the other pages of this site, where I give you the rundown of another persons recipes with my own annotations, I'm going to set this up like one of those blog posts, because this recipe is my own(well, my mom's. It'll be mine someday though.) So here we go, oatmeal bread!

Ingredients:

-1 cup Old Fashioned Oats

-2 cups Boiling Water

-3 packages(or 3 tablespoons) Active Dry Yeast

-1/3 cup Warm Water

-1 tablespoon Salt

-1/2 Honey

-2 tablespoons Melted Butter

-5(ish) cups All Purpose Flour

-Vegetable Oil

First things first, you're going to combine the boiling water with the oats to soften them up, then let it sit for half an hour. Once the 30 minutes is nearly up, you'll bloom the yeast. As we learned in my Baking is a Science page, yeast needs to be activated before you add it into a recipe. In this case, we mix the yeast with the warm water(NOT the boiling water, that will kill the yeast) and honey. Set that aside to do it's think for a few minutes until it gets all nice and foamy. Once the yeast is ready, combine it along with the butter and one cup of flour to the soaked oats, and stir to combine. Then, one cup at a time, add flour to the mixture until you get a soft dough that is slightly sticky. Then, clean and flour your counter, turn the dough out onto it, and start kneading.

Now, I have a technique for kneading that I find easy to replicate. What you'll do is scoop both of my hands under the side of the dough that is furthest from me, fold it over itself towards me, then press down with the heels of my hands. Then I rotate the dough 90 degrees and do it all over again. You'll knead the dough until your arms fall off. I'm kidding, but it requires a lot of kneading to reach the right texture. What you're looking for is barely tacky to the touch, and if you push a dent into it, the dent springs back after a few seconds.

Use the vegetable oil to grease the bowl you mixed everything together in(this cuts down on the number of dishes to wash later), then put the dough into the bowl, spin it around, then flip it over so the oiled side is up. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and place it in a warm spot in your kitchen. If you're not sure where that would be, just stick it in the microwave. Now it has to rise for about an hour, or until it looks like the dough has doubled in size.

Once the dough has risen enough, you're going to divide the dough in half and place each half into it's own, greased with vegetable oil, loaf pan. My mom uses her stoneware loaf pans because they are FANTASTIC for baking bread, but metal works too. Cover each loaf with the same plastic from earlier and let it rise one more time until it has doubled in size, which takes about 45 minutes.

Now, before you start the oven, but the risen loaves gently into the oven. This is moms secret to baking bread. You start the bread off in a cold oven, that way the dough doesn't collapse. Turn the oven to 325˚F and bake for about 50 minutes, when it's nice and golden brown. If you're not sure if your bread is done just by looking at it, you can take the bread out of the pan and gently knock on the bottom of the loaf. If it sounds hollow, it's done! Pull the loaves out of the oven, remove from the pans, and let them cool on a wire rack. For best storage, wrap the loaves in aluminum foil and keep in the fridge. If you won't eat two loaves fast enough(I always do but that's because I'm a bread-o-holic), then wrap the bread in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil and stick in the freezer until you're ready to eat.

And that's it! Super simple and easy, and almost fool-proof. Once you make it one time, every time after that will be a hell of a lot easier than the time before. And before you know it, you'll start making other breads!