Perfect White Bread

A slice of white bread being spread with butter.

This soft, homemade white bread from scratch is perfect for beginning bread bakers! Delicious for toast, sandwiches or just hot and fresh, oozing with melted butter. It rises three times to make it extra soft and fluffy.

Course Bread

Cuisine Amercian Heritage

Prep Time 20 minutes

Cook Time 30 minutes

Rising Time 2 hours 30 minutes

Total Time 3 hours 20 minutes

Servings slices

Calories 173kcal

Author Marye Audet-White

Equipment

Ingredients

1 cup Milk 110F. If you have sour milk you can use that.
2 tablespoons Sugar
¼ teaspoons Ginger it is a yeast activator, you wont taste it.
2 teaspoons Salt I use kosher salt - if you use table salt use about ¼ teaspoon less
2 tablespoons Butter room temperature
2 packages Active dry yeast
½ cup Water
5 cups All-purpose flour you may need a bit more
Oil to grease pans

Instructions

Stir the sugar and butter into the warm milk and set aside.
Sprinkle yeast, ginger and a pinch of sugar on the water.
Stir to dissolve and let it stand until bubbly.
Add to milk mixture and stir in 3 cups of flour.
Stir in the salt.
Beat at medium speed about 2 minutes or stir by hand until batter is smooth.
Add enough remaining flour to form a dough that leaves the sides of the bowl.
Turn on to lightly floured surface, cover and let rest 10 minutes.
Knead until smooth and elastic-about 10 minutes.
Round up into a ball and oil all sides.
Place in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a tea towel.
Let rise in a warm place until doubled about 1 ½ hours. (The inside of the oven with the light on is perfect).
Punch down.
Cover and let rise again until doubled, about 30 minutes. You may omit this rising if you are pushed for time. It does help the texture, however.
Shape into a loaf and place in an oiled bread pan.
Lightly oil the tops.
Let rise until almost doubled, and bread is rounded above the pan, 30-45 minutes.
Bake at 375 for 20 to 30 minutes, or until loaves sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
Cool in pan for 5 minutes, remove from pan, and finish cooling.
If a soft crust is desired cover the loaf with a clean tea towel during the cooling process.

Video

Notes

Variations

Add 1 ½ cups of raisins during kneading for raisin bread.
Use honey for the sugar.
Use brown sugar.
You can substitute almond, soy, oat, or other non-dairy product for the milk. You can even leave the milk out and use plain water.
You can use any light flavored oil instead of butter.
Pinch off balls of dough and use as dinner rolls.
Add an envelope of dry onion soup mix during mixing for onion bread or rolls.

If you have questions you can find more answers in this Bread Baking FAQs list.

Nutrition