Ingredients for Making Braided Bread

Series Summary

Bread has served as one of the most basic, yet essential, foodstuffs man has ever known. For centuries, even before yeast and the leavening process were discovered, bread was a large part of the diet of people of almost every civilization. It is believed that the first bread was eaten as far back as the Neolithic Era, when, through the serendipity of a happy accident, a caveman cooked water and cereal grains together. Yet this seemingly inconsequential find, a simple crust of bread, would forever change how a people survive vicious, cold winters without growing crops or animals to hunt. And bread is still one of the most widely consumed foods in the world today. As modern as we are, we still depend on bread and foods derived from bread for our daily sustenance.

In this free video series, our expert will take a basic bread recipe and turn it into a holiday treat by making braided bread in the shape of a wreath. You will get step by step instructions for activating the yeast, mixing the flour, sugar, oil and eggs, and creating the dough. You will also get tips on how to let the dough rise and then roll it into ropes for shaping. This braided bread shaped like a wreath is perfect for a holiday dinner or any occasion.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make a braided wreath of bread. Okay, let's go over our ingredient list for our wreath of bread today. First thing we're going to have here is some yeast. This is active dry yeast. This going to be two packages or depending on how you buy it, one half of an ounce by weight or it's also four and a half teaspoons. So depending on how you purchase it will determine on how you would weigh that out. Also going to have two cups here of warm water to active the yeast in. Besides that we're also going to have four teaspoons of salt. This is just regular old, actually this is sea salt, but whatever if you have iodize salt that will work as well. I've also got one half cup of granulated sugar here as well as a cup of, this is actually a mixture of half a cup of vegetable oil and half a cup of olive oil. I want to get some of the olive oil's flavor but olive oil doesn't bake as well as vegetable oil so I kind of mixed them half and half. I also have four whole eggs here, three of which are going to be for the bread and one is to be brushed on the outside to give it kind of a nice shine and then right here is the flour. This is about ten cups of flour. You're going to need somewhere between nine and eleven cups of flour. So I going to start with ten and then we'll go from there. You know baking not really exact when it comes to flour. So this is just all purpose baking flour. You can use self-rising if you want but careful about how much you use because if you combine the self-rising with the yeast you can end up with an unwieldy loaf of bread. So that being said, let's move on to what equipment we going to need."