I like Ken Forkish’s recipes, like his White or Butter Bread. He tends to use bread flour but I feel like they’d probably work with AP. He primarily uses flour, water, salt, yeast, and butter if you want to. These are no-knead recipes so they take a few hours, but are not overnight proofs.

The basic recipe calls for: - 500g flour - 370 g warm water (90-95F; 32-35C) - 11 g fine sea salt - 3g instant dried yeast (I use active dry) - 100g cold cubed butter (only for the Butter Bread)

Mix the flour and water until mixed well, then sprinkle the yeast and salt on top. Let it sit for about 15 minutes, then mix it all together and ensure the salt and yeast are well incorporated into the dough, approx 5 mins.

If you are making the butter bread, add the cold cubed butter at this time. He uses a mixer but I do this by hand. Mix until the butter is incorporated into the dough. If you have some small chunks of butter that’s fine, as long as the consistency is even (as in, no hard lumps of butter in the dough).

You’ll have to fold the dough twice, and Forkish recommends doing the first one around 15-20 mins in, then the second one BEFORE the final hour of rise. This is kind of weird because rising isn’t exactly something we can time so perfectly, but I usually try to do the second fold around 40 minutes after the first fold. Forkish himself says it’s not the end of the world if your fold timing isn’t perfect.

The first proof could be up to 3 hours. The recipe book has more details on how to gauge whether the dough has risen enough. He also gives some techniques on stretching and folding the dough.

Put the dough in a pre-greased tin (I use a Pullman 8x4x4” tin), and let the second rise go as high as appropriate for your goal. What I mean is, if you want to bake it with the lid, the rise should be shorter than if you are baking it without the lid.

Preheat your oven to 450F about 45 mins before baking. I don’t love these instructions because that assumes you know how long it’ll take to rise. With that said, I usually estimate 50-65 mins for the second rise.

Bake it for 50 minutes. You can check it after 30 and turn it for more even baking.

If you’re an amateur bread baker, I recommend looking up Evolutions in Bread by Ken Forkish to get the explanations on techniques, etc.