Jacob's Personal Sandwich Bread Recipe:

A journey to create my own bread recipe from scratch (no pun intended)

Version 1

I've been baking bread for about 15 years or so now. I started with white and wheat sandwich loaves-- they're easy and my mom was famous for hers, so I had a good coach. I've been through a ton of different bread phases over the year. From sourdough boules to 5-minute-a-day high hydration, ciabatta, focaccia, pizza dough, you name it.

I consider the artisan stuff to be my "hobby" breads. They're fun to make, but I go through phases with them. I tend to gravitate towards those kinds of breads in fall and winter. Sandwich bread, though, is fun to make, but I also consider it just normal, routine cooking/baking. We've got two young kids, and I want them to grow up eating homemade bread like I did. Plus, we make our own yogurt now, so I get between a quart and a half gallon of whey each week, depending on how much I strain it. I decided recently I wanted to develop my very own sandwich loaf recipe. I've made enough of them now that I have a good idea of what I do and don't like in a dough. I've never come up with a recipe from scratch, so I'll document my progress here. I have a few must-haves for the end result of my efforts:

  1. Bread should rise. proof, and bake somewhat quickly. I'd like to be able to casually make it Saturday mornings (or even before work during the week)
  2. Recipe should be straightforward and not overly complicated. I want to know it by heart, of course; but, I also want anyone that's made it a few times to be able to remember it
  3. I want the baker's percentages to be pretty simple. I've never really used them to guide recipes before, and this seems like an easy way to start.
  4. I want it to stay fresh for 5-7 days in the bread box
  5. I want the crumb to obviously be soft, but to hold up to spreads and sandwiches
I started a couple months ago with this version:
Ingredients Weight Baker's Percentage
AP flour 515g 100
yogurt whey 350g 67.9
instant yeast 10g 1.9
salt 10g 1.9
malted milk powder 10g 1.9
potato flakes 25g 4.8
sugar 9g 1.7

Already, I made my first mistake. I tried splitting this recipe into two loaves and could not figure out why they weren't rising well enough in the second proof. They came out short and squat (but delicious!) Turns out that this is enough for *one large loaf*, not two regular loaves. For v2, I changed up some things to try and correct this. v2 is when I also realized my mistake and began making a single loaf after a few tries, which helped with my loaf size issues (but now it was too big).

Here's v2:
Ingredients Weight Baker's Percentage
AP flour 515g 100
yogurt whey 350g 67.9
instant yeast 10g 1.9
salt 10g 1.9
malted milk powder 5g 0.97
potato flakes 25g 4.8
sugar 9g 1.7

Version 3-5 or so

At this point, I experimented with some things that I won't bother to write out in detail, because I abandoned the approach. My thought was to use barley malt syrup (non-diastatic) instead of malted milk powder. I was hoping it would help the bread brown a bit better and give it more malt flavor. It didn't really do those things, though. What it *did* do was make the crumb a bit too gummy for our tastes, so I abandoned the approach.

Version 6

Here's where I started to make some more significant changes. First, I just increased the weight of ingredients while keeping the baker's percentages roughly the same. I also switched to bread flour. By increasing the volume 1.5 times (with some rounding to make life a bit easier), I ended up with two, moderately sized loaves that are perfect for our family.

Ingredients Weight Baker's Percentage
bread flour 775g 100
yogurt whey 525g 67.8
instant yeast 15g 1.9
salt 15g 1.9
malted milk powder 10g 1.3
potato flakes 40g 5.2
sugar 15g 1.9

Versions 7-8

Ok, so now I've got the size down. These are slightly smaller than a typical homemade loaf, but the perfect sizes for how we usually use bread. Plus, with the baker's percentages, I can ramp up the size easily for things like St Patty's reubens, or trim them down for finger sandwiches and crostini. I didn't really change much for version 7, so I won't bother writing out the recipe. I just added an egg. For version 8, though, I completely removed the potato flakes. I wanted to see how/if that affected the end result.

Ingredients Weight Baker's Percentage
bread flour 775g 100
yogurt whey 525g 67.8
instant yeast 15g 1.9
salt 15g 1.9
malted milk powder 10g 1.3
sugar 15g 1.9
large egg varies varies

We actually liked this a bit better than they potato flake version! Not quite as dense. For the next version, I think I will add some potato flakes back in. Maybe 2-3% versus the 5% they were before. I'll also increase the malted milk powder quite a bit to see how that changes things. But across two separate bakes, of course.