Easy Beginner 4 Ingredient Homemade Bread

I feel like “making bread” is one of those things that everyone thinks is going to take a lot of work and time. Is the reason we don’t make fresh bread because we ask ourselves, “Is it really worth the time spent?”, and talk ourselves out of it before we even get started. At Least this is what kept me from making bread for so many years. I thought I needed to knead dough forever and have a bread machine to make good bread. Little did I know, I could make an Easy Beginner 4 Ingredient Homemade Bread with only 10 minutes of my time and very little work. 

Why did we start making our own bread?

The thing that started my snowball of thoughts to figure out how to make bread easily was . . . learning that grocery store bread in the U.S. has so many unhealthy additives. We are always trying to find ways to minimize the amount of processed things we eat so, I started digging around for recipes and information on how to make bread. I found out that you really only need 4 ingredients and a loaf pan to make bread. 

This bread recipe really is the easiest one you may ever come across. It’s one of those recipes where you spend 5 minutes combining ingredients and then forget it for a while. So you can go do other things you need to get done while the bread is rising. Since this recipe makes two loaves. Brent and I cannot always eat it fast enough before it starts molding. I will freeze one of the loaves to eat at a later date. Store bought bread has a lot of added preservative ingredients that keeps its shelf life that we don’t want to ingest. Our bread only has the 4 natural ingredients that make it healthy to eat. Bread loaves made using this recipe stay good for a week or two depending on time of year and moisture content in your home.

The one thing we didn’t have in the beginning that I wish we had is a bread slicer. If homemade bread is something you will be making regularly. I would recommend investing in a bread slicer. This will make life so much easier when it comes to cutting uniform slices of bread for sandwiches or whatever you are eating it with. 

How to make

This recipe only needs 4 ingredients; flour, salt, active dry yeast, and warm water. First, put 6 cups of flour in a large mixing bowl. On one side of the bowl add your 2 tsp salt and on the other side of the bowl add 1 tsp. of active dry yeast. Add 3.5 cups of warm water and combine until mixed well and sticky. Cover the mixing bowl with saran wrap and let the dough rise overnight for 8-12 hours in a cold oven. The dough should quadruple in size by the morning.

Dump the dough out onto a floured countertop and then also flour the top of the dough. The dough will still be sticky at this point. Work the dough until it is no longer sticky with a bread spatula. Cut it into two equal parts. Grease two bread loaf pans and put the dough into each. Cover with a lid or aluminum foil if you don’t have a lid. Put the dough into a cold oven (do not preheat) and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lids and bake another 30 minutes uncovered at 450’. I love these bread loaf pans that come with lids but you can also just use aluminum foil to cover if you don’t have anything with a lid. We have also used my small 5 qt. dutch oven and covered casserole dish to bake the bread before and it was perfect! Here is an inexpensive bread slicer I found on amazon that has a lot of amazing reviews!

I hope you love this Easy Beginner 4 Ingredient Homemade Bread Recipe!

As always, I love hearing from you and your experience with making our recipes! Leave a comment below letting me know what you thought of making the bread! You can also head over to my social channels where you can find videos of me making all kinds of things for our home!

Recipe Card (Printable below)