Since 6 months I have been making my own bread. When I tell people that I don’t buy bread anymore but just make it myself I usually get reactions like, ‘wow you must have too much time on your hands’ or ‘oh I would love to do that but just don’t have enough time’. The interesting thing is, it actually doesn’t take that much time.

Doesn’t that look nice? So how much time did this take?
10 minutes mixing ingredients + 5 minutes shaping the dough

Ok, ok, fair enough, you don’t have a bread in 15 minutes. After mixing the ingredients you need to let the dough rise for 1 hour. I normally use this time to: read, watch tv, play music, go for a run.. so, things that you actually should do in your free time anyway!

Then after this hour, you need to shape the dough, and put it in the oven. Then, you have another 20 + 20 minutes to do nice things! I say 20 + 20 because normally I put the bread one level lower in the oven to prevent it from becoming black. I also take this chance to spray some extra water in the oven so you get this nice crunchy crust. After 40 minutes you could eat it right away, but it’s better to let it cool down for an hour or so.