Actually very easy

Bread

The beliefBread is assumed to need a kneading technique, a special flour and a stone oven.

The truthFlour, water, salt, yeast. Four ingredients and four ratios — what looks like craft is the ratios.

20 minutes of work, four hours of waiting

How to make it

What you need

500 g strong bread flour
350 g water, a 70% hydration
10 g salt, 2%
5 g fresh yeast, or 1.5 g dried

How the engine read this list (4 lines)

500 g	Strong bread flour	flour
350 g	Water	water
10 g	Salt	salt
5 g	Fresh yeast	yeast

An empty weight means that line could not be turned into grams — either the amount is open ("to taste") or the ingredient has no record here. Neither enters the sum as zero; they do not enter it at all.

Mix the flour and water and leave it, unkneaded, for thirty minutes. That wait replaces most of the kneading: the flour takes up the water and the gluten starts to build itself.
Add the salt and yeast and knead for five minutes. It should turn smooth and elastic: if a piece stretches into a thin translucent film without tearing, the gluten is there.
Cover the bowl and prove at 24 °C for two to three hours, folding one edge of the dough into the middle every thirty minutes: strength without kneading.
Shape it, set it on a tray and leave it another 45 minutes. Press a finger in: the dent should spring back slowly. Springing back at once means too early; not at all means too late.
Heat the oven to 250 °C with a tray of hot water on the bottom shelf. Score the top, bake ten minutes with the steam, then remove the tray and give it 25 minutes more at 220 °C. Take it out at an internal 96–98 °C.

Why it works

Bread is four ratios and nothing else. Hydration — water against flour — sets the texture: 60% gives a firm dough that shapes easily, 75% a slack one with an open crumb. Salt is 2% by weight and is not there for taste alone; it tightens the gluten network and reins the yeast in so fermentation stays orderly, while an unsalted dough rises fast and then collapses. Yeast runs about 1% fresh or 0.3% dried. Kneading brings the flour’s two proteins, gliadin and glutenin, together with water into a gluten network — but that network also forms on its own: wetting the dough and leaving it half an hour, an autolyse, does most of the kneading for you. What happens in the oven is oven spring: the yeast surges one last time, the water in the dough flashes to steam and inflates the cells, and at 60 °C the yeast dies and the structure sets. The loaf is done at an internal temperature of 96–98 °C — under it is dough, over it is dry.

The rough sum

865 grams going in

1825 kcal in total

100% of the mass has figures behind it. This is the sum of what GOES IN rather than of what comes out. Wherever something evaporates, drains or ferments the two differ: a kilo of milk is 150 g of cheese.

Diets it qualifies for

Vegan Vegetarian Lactose-free

Storage & shelf life

How long it keeps

Cut face down, in a cloth: 2–3 days
In a plastic bag: 3 days, but the crust softens
Fridge: Not advised — it stales faster
Freezer, sliced: 3 months

Bread does not stale by drying but by starch retrogradation: the starch chains that bound water during baking recrystallise as it cools and push that water back out. The process runs fastest between 0 and 7 °C — which means the fridge stales bread faster than the counter does. Freezing stops it, so the right way to keep bread is sliced and frozen. Five minutes at 150 °C partly reverses retrogradation, and the loaf genuinely does freshen: that is not an illusion.

When to bin it Green, black or white fuzzy patches mean the whole loaf goes. Cutting mould out and eating the rest is not safe in a soft food: the threads run far beyond what you can see.

History

Where it comes from

In Anatolia bread is less a food than a unit of measure: *ekmek parası* for a living, *tuz ekmek hakkı* for the bond of having eaten together. Technically it divides by region too — tandır bread is stuck to a wall and baked by radiation, bazlama cooks on a griddle, somun in the neighbourhood oven. Until commercial yeast spread at the end of the nineteenth century all of it was sourdough, with starter passing between neighbours. Baking at home looks hard today for reasons of habit rather than technique: we are relearning, a century later, what every household once did.

The knack

No thermometer? Turn the loaf over and knock the base: a hollow drum means done, a dull thud means raw.
Do not cut it hot. The starch finishes setting as it cools, and a loaf cut warm stays gummy inside.
Never skip the salt. Unsalted bread is not merely bland: it over-rises and collapses in the oven.

Dough and grain