The Continuing Saga of Bread
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I made bread yesterday. Note that I made bread, rather than just trying to make bread.
I've always avoided adding milk. I think bread should be simple. But yesterday I thought I'd try adding some milk to the recipe. I made two loaves. One looked like a french bread baguette, the other was 4 ropes braided together.
I baked them at different temperatures, for different lengths of time, just to see what would happen. The braided bread had a thick, yummy crust. The french bread had a thinner, crispy crust. They both tasted like Wonder brand bread.
(bleah)

So there you have it. I made "perfect" bread, and it was bland. The hubby-man and son agreed that it was bland and uninteresting; as they gobbled it all up.

If you want to make your own bland, uninteresting white bread, you'll need:
1 package of dry active yeast that has a "best if used by" date of 2002
6 cups of all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons of butter
5 teaspoons of salt
2 tablespoons of sugar, plus another tablespoon of sugar
1 1/2 cups of milk
1/2 a cup of warm water

stir the ancient yeast and a tablespoon of sugar into the 1/2 cup of warm water. Let that sit while you put the milk, butter, salt and additional sugar in a saucepan. Heat it just enough to melt the butter.
While your wet ingredients are warming up, check your yeast. If there are tan bubbles sitting on top of the water/yeast/sugar mix, and if the bubbles are 2 inches (5 cm) high, then your yeast is usable. Yay!
When the butter is just barely melted, dump the wet ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Whisk it around to make sure the sugar and salt are dissolved, then start adding flour.
Put one cup of flour in the wet stuff, whisk it around, put in another cup and whisk that around too. You should have goop that looks like pancake mix. Add the yeast and water.
Listen intently as you whisk in the yeast/water mix. The little yeasties will be screaming, "Curse you Breadmaker! Curse you and your wire whisk of doom! Curse you for destroying our bubbly little houses!... Oh, wait... We can move into this nice flour instead... Nevermind."

Gradually stir in your last 4 cups of flour. You'll reach a point where it would be easier to stick your hands in there, rather than try and move a spoon or whisk around. So grab a cutting board, lightly flour it, and dump the flaky, sticky blob of dough onto the board. Knead thoroughly. Within about 5 minutes, the dough will stick to the ball instead of your fingers. Knead it some more, until it looks somewhat like a ball of dough.
Cut the ball of dough in half. Set one half aside and work on the other half. You can knead it a few more times for good measure, but this time you want to try and tuck all the ugly bits inside or underneath. When the top half of your dough ball is reasonably attractive, put it in a lightly greased container, grease the top of the ball, cover it with a warm, damp towel, and stash it in the oven.
Do the same thing with the other half of the dough.
Now find something to occupy your time for an hour or so.
Your yeasties will spend that time making babies and learning about urban sprawl. Little do they know, the apocalypse is looming...
After an hour or so, check on your bread. It should be twice as big as it was when you started. It's time to destroy civilization. (muahaha)
Punch down the dough. Literally. Drop your fist into the middle of your bread. I don't care for large air bubbles, so I also poke my fingers all around the edges of the bread.
Shape the bread however you want, place it on whatever you're going to bake it in, and cover it with a damp towel.
Again, find something to amuse yourself with for 45-90 minutes.
Before baking, beat one egg with a little water and brush it over the tops of your loaves. I have no idea what this does, but the recipe suggested it, so I tried it.

I baked the braided bread for 40 minutes at 375 degrees. It came out a little over done.
I baked the french bread at 425 for 20 minutes and it came out perfect.

I think my bland white bread will be perfect for cinnamon rolls. I might try that for my next bread-baking experiment.