Comfort food in the form of bread

Here is my bread recipe. Try it, you'll like it! It's not nearly as hard as it seems, in fact, on review, it doesn't seem hard at all, so what are you waiting for?

Ingredients for one loaf. Just double ingredients for 2 loaves.

• 1 & 1/3 cup hot water
• 1 packet of yeast (rapid rising or regular, doesn't matter) 1 packet = 2 & 1/4 tsp
• Tbsp of Sugar or Honey, or more depending on your preference.
• 3 C flour. Plus some, up to 1/4 cup when kneading. I like to use 1 C of whole wheat to 2 C of unbleached white, but you could do equal parts or all white. Just not all whole wheat.
• dash of salt, or about 1/2 to 1 tsp. You could use garlic or onion salt for variety!
• 3 Tbsp of oil. Use veggie, canola, EVOO, or whatever you'd like. This is approximate, sometimes I only use about 1Tbsp. Depends on my mood, I guess!

You can do this one of two ways, I will tell you both.

1. Place all measured flour in a large bowl. I use a large stainless steel one (Pampered Chef to be exact). Add salt. Mix and make a well in center of bowl with your hands.
2. Pour hot water in well and add sugar/honey and yeast and mix gently, but do not incorporate flour mix as of yet! Let sit for about 10 minutes to activate the yeast. The wet mixture will be foamy when it's ready.
3. Add oil and mix all ingredients together, slowly incorporating the flour in with the water mix. I just use my hand for this, but it is messy!
4. The other option is:
5. Place water, yeast and sugar/honey in bowl and sit for 10 minutes to activate yeast. When mixture is foamy add flour and salt and start mixing together.
6. Start kneading dough until not sticky, adding additional flour by the Tbsp if needed. Dough will be one piece (not liquid) and look like dough! You can continue kneading in bowl if you'd like, but sometimes it's better to do on a lightly floured counter. Here is a great video on how to knead bread thanks to Epicurious! I knead my dough about 4 minutes. It's very therapeutic, I think.
7. Place dough back into lightly oiled bowl (I just spray with non-stick cooking spray) and give dough a flip to cover the dough with oil. Place towel over bowl and let rise. If you use rapid rise yeast, about 30-40 minutes is perfect, if regular about an hour works.
8. When rise time is down check your dough! It's all puffed up! Punch it! Go ahead, it's ok! punch it! Actually punching it down gets rid of the air that is in the dough and knead again for about another minute or so to make sure all the bubbles are out. Remove from bowl to do this if you'd like.
9. Take your dough and lightly pat it out into a big fat disc and roll into a loaf shape. Place in bread pan that has been lightly oiled. If you made dough for 2 loaves just split dough into two equal parts and do the same.
10. Place loaf pan(s) into a COLD oven and turn on to 350 degrees. The dough will rise a second time while the oven is preheating! Set a timer for 45 minutes.
11. Remove bread from oven and let cool a moment before removing from loaf pan. Set bread on cooling rack and cover towel for a bit until cool enough to sample, I mean slice up.
12. It's better to slice your bread all at the same time. It keeps it from being too crumbly.
13. Bread stores in a large gallon size ziploc bag for about 2 days.

I will come back and post step-by-step pictures the next time I bake bread, either tomorrow or the next day! Until then, here is a picture of today's finished product!