Over 30 Holiday Bread Recipes for Gifts (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret ingredient in bread? ›

While many bakers focus on flour, yeast, and water, there's a lesser-known but equally important ingredient that can make all the difference—cream of tartar. This unassuming white powder is the secret to creating the fluffiest and most tender loaves of bread.

Seeds: Adding seeds like sunflower, pumpkin, or sesame seeds can add a nice crunch and flavor to bread. Nuts: Chopped nuts, such as almonds or walnuts, can be added to bread for a great texture. Dried fruits: Adding dried fruits such as raisins, cranberries, or apricots can make bread a sweet and fruity.

Using fresh ingredients to flavour your dough

Fresh vegetables such as peppers and cherry tomatoes work really well in bread dough. But don't add them in raw – they'll add too much moisture to your dough. Instead, roast them in the oven to both increase their flavour and dry them out.

Dough first, then add seeds

The other option is to add the seeds once the dough is adequately mixed and gluten has formed and developed to your recipe requirements.

Use a supplemented dough – Add butter, honey, or oil. The extra fats and sugars help retain moisture and keep your bread from drying out in a few days.

You can also add herbs and seasonings such as garlic, rosemary, dill, chopped onion, jalapeño, shredded cheese, chopped nuts, dried cranberries, etc. My no yeast bread is the quick bread alternative here—you can add flavors to that loaf, too! Baker's Tip: Avoid adding too much flour to the dough as you work with it.

If you're looking to ramp up the taste of your favorite bread recipe, we recommend adding a bit of fat. A fat like butter, olive oil or coconut oil in small quantities will help your bread achieve a higher rise and it will also boost its flavor by tenfold.

There is the sweetness of anise or the spiciness of fennel seed, the fragrance of rosemary or lavender, the tang of chillies or the savory notes of thyme, oregano, marjoram and chives.

Too much baking soda in a recipe can give your baked goods a metallic or soapy taste, so be careful with your amounts in conversions.

How do you make homemade bread fluffier? ›

Add Sugar

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

You can soak seeds overnight, strain them, and add them to a bread dough during mixing (easiest) or during an early round of stretching and folding the dough (better gluten development).

Topping bread dough with seeds and grains is a simple and effective way to increase the nutrition, flavor, and texture in a baked loaf of bread.

An important factor to this dough is the need to pre-soak the toasted seeds before adding them to the dough to prevent the seeds from absorbing all the water in the dough. I usually soak the seeds in about 5% extra water right when I start with autolyse.

Wheat flour is the key ingredient in most breads. Flour quality is particularly important in breadmaking as the quality of the flour will have a significant impact on the finished product. When flour is moistened and stirred, beaten or kneaded, gluten develops to give dough `stretch`.

Adding sugar weakens the gluten structure, absorbs water, and eventually makes the bread lighter and softer. As a result, sugar improves the bread's taste, structure and texture. Yeast also eats up sugar to produce carbon dioxide, which raises the dough and makes bread fluffy.

The cream of tartar also makes the preparations softer and lighter, as it inflates leavened products without weighing them down: therefore it is excellent for making biscuits, cakes, croissants but also bread, savory pies and other baked products that have a good leavening.

Once reactivated, yeast begins feeding on the sugars in flour, and releases the carbon dioxide that makes bread rise (although at a much slower rate than baking powder or soda). Yeast also adds many of the distinctive flavors and aromas we associate with bread.