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 started a couple months ago with this version:

Recipe Details

• Prep Time: 3 hours (mostly on rises)
• Difficulty: Beginner with some break baking experience
• Makes: 2 loaves (or so I thought!))

|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 corrected my loaf size issues (but now it was too big).

Here's v2:

Version 2

Recipe Details

• Prep Time: 3 hours (mostly on rises)
• Difficulty: Beginner with some bread baking experience
• Makes: 1 large loaf

|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|