Bread is cheap and versatile and can be very impressive once you become creative with added ingredients and inventive with shapes.  It is well worth making and really getting to understand how dough works. Bread provides starchy carbohydrate for energy in the diet.

Using a bread mix is a quick way to produce home-style bread.  You can make all sorts of shapes and add extra ingredients once you get the hang of kneading the dough.

Cooks Know How: Bread flour is called strong flour because it is made from wheat with a higher protein content than the wheat grains used for cake flour.  The extra protein in the wheat grain, called gluten, makes the dough become stretchy when it is kneaded well.  Water mixed into the flour creates the gluten.  Bread dough has to be stretched and kneaded to give it good elasticity to help it trap the gas produced by the yeast.  The yeast plays an important part in creating carbon dioxide gas to raise the dough and give bread an open and light texture. It is essential to leave the dough to rise at least once usually after you have shaped it.  Look for it to become puffy and double the size it was before.  It needs warm room temperature and time.  

Once the dough sticks have risen cook them in a hot oven. The outer crust will change colour and texture due to the heat of the oven, the starch browns and the gluten ‘crusts’ whilst the inner part of the bread holds a risen shape and remains white.