We got about a thousand wedding gifts from our wonderful friends and family (including not one, not two, but FOUR waffle irons) and among those presents was a bread machine.

I scoffed at it.

Bread. Who MAKES bread? From scratch? Who has time for that? Plus my mom had a bread machine some time in the early '90s, and the bread it made was weird-shaped and underdone in the middle. Who needs that?

My husband wisely convinced me to at least give it a try before throwing what was probably a pretty expensive gift into the Goodwill pile.

And from that very first loaf of "basic white" bread I made on a rainy Saturday morning in our little Salem apartment, I've been hooked. There is just nothing like home made bread.

I got so hooked on homemade bread, in fact, that for many years we eschewed store-bought bread completely. Sandwiches, toast, dinner rolls--whatever we ate, I made from scratch.

These days, I hand out so many slices of bread and jam and PB&Js that I just can't keep up with the demand for bread. (If you want to read about a woman who is making ALL her food from scratch for a year, check out The Slow Food Experiment). I now buy grocery-store bread to have on hand for toast and sandwiches.

But if I want bread as a side dish at dinner--which I frequently do--then I make it from scratch. There is just nothing better than bread with soup, or salad, or an Italian-style dinner...homemade bread goes with pretty much everything, in my opinion. Sometimes I make it in the bread machine, sometimes I make it in the bread machine but take it out while it's still at the dough stage so I can shape it how I please and bake it in the oven, sometimes I do the no-knead artisan bread method, sometimes I make rolls, sometimes I make focaccia.

I have several go-to favorite bread recipes, but this is my favorite FAST homemade bread recipe. I got it from Allrecipes.com about four years ago as a recipe for homemade hamburger buns (it was called "Tasty Buns," which sounds slightly pornographic to me) but I've used it for bread of all kinds, not just buns. The beautiful thing about this recipe is that even if I wasn't on top of things enough to have my dough made and rising all day long, if I manage to think of it even an hour before dinnertime, I still have time for this recipe. Yep, it only takes an hour, start to finish, for reals.


Fast Homemade Bread

5 cups flour (you can use all-purpose, or any combination of white and wheat flour. I have made it with all whole-wheat, which of course results in a denser loaf. I prefer about half and half. Sometimes I throw in wheat germ or flax seeds or something if I have them on hand)
4 1/2 tsp dry yeast
1 cup milk
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt.

1. Stir together 2 cups of the flour and the yeast. in a separate bowl, heat milk, water, oil, sugar and salt to lukewarm in microwave. Add all at once to the flour mixture and beat until smooth, about three minutes.

2. Mix in enough flour to make a soft dough, 2-3 cups. Mix well. Dust a flat surface with flour, turn dough out onto floured surface, and let rest under bowl for about 10 minutes.

3. Shape dough--you can make it into a couple of loaves, or a bunch of breadsticks, or dinner rolls, or hamburger-bun-size, as the original recipe called for. Place on greased baking sheet to rise until doubled in size (about 30 minutes).

4. Bake in a 400 degree oven. Baking time will vary depending on what you're cooking. Rolls, about 12 minutes. Breadsticks or larger buns, 15-20. Loaves, 25-30.


The bread turns out light, soft, yeasty-tasting, slightly-crumbly bread. It's not the same as a nice, chewy, crisp-crusted loaf of French bread, but it's tasty and it's fast and it's homemade. Homemade bread for dinner in an hour! You can't beat that.