ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

ChefSteps

We want to help you bake bread. Here at ChefSteps, we have worked over the years to create recipes for breads—brioche; bagels; and buttermilk biscuits—that are bullet-proof and predictable. You can count on our bread recipes. Why bake bread? Bread has been a fundamental food foundation of humanity for thousands of years. Making bread is pretty inexpensive. The process of putting together ingredients and shaping them into a loaf requires your attention. Of course, eating bread is comforting. This is a good time to bake bread and share it.If you are devoted to bread already, you can upgrade your skills with our recipes. If you have never made bread before, start now. We have done much of the work for you, so follow our instructions and weigh out the ingredients, then see what happens. Your first loaf might not be perfect. It might look a little wonky. Still, it’s bread. You will learn from every loaf. Enjoy the process. Here is the key question—what is bread? Is it a country loaf? Long-fermented rye bread? English muffins? Pizza dough? Naan? Cornbread? Yes. At the heart of bread is flour, water, air, and heat. Sometimes bread has yeast or an enriching ingredient like butter. Sometimes bread is grilled and sometimes it is baked in an oven. If you took the air out of bread, it would be pasta. Take the flour out and it will never be bread. Take out water and what you are making is a random assemblage of ingredients that do not hold together. Without heat it would all be amorphous goo. Put all four together and transformation happens—something crunchy, crusty, soft, and solid. Suddenly, it’s bread. Different types of breads create constellations: lean breads, enriched breads, quick breads, flatbreads, chewy breads, and slow-rising breads. Take a look at these categories to figure out which bread you want to tackle first. Welcome to the universe of bread.