The type of "bread" they are referring to doesn't use yeast. McDonald's buns are basically sweetened dough with air beaten into it. Definitely suggest people eat McDonald's "food" bit by bit if you're into it. Might just put you off.
And, in any case, you don't need to put sugar in for yeast. The best bread has nothing of the sort. Just flour, yeast, salt and water.
I prefer to not include salt in bread, but I add the required daily amount of salt to other kinds of food, where the added salt really improves the taste.
Salt really does improve the flavour of bread. I’m impressed you have got used to bread without salt because it tastes awful to me unless eaten with salty foods.
>> Bread without salt does not taste good at all, unless you’re a highly partisan Tuscan.
Have you personally tried it? I cook for a relative who can't eat salt for health reasons and I make bread for them too, without salt. It tastes from bland to quite-decent=actually, depending on the amount of wholemeal flours I use. For example, 1/3 each of strong white flour, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal dark rye tastes good and smells divine as it bakes.
I think when people say that saltless bread tastes bad they mean plain white bread.
Nah, salt isn't optional. It's totally possible to eat well and enjoy it. In my experience, people who are afraid of salt usually consume tons of hidden salt in things they don't make themselves.
During the last years, I have switched to baking the bread in a microwave oven.
It is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven and this allows me to bake a bread every morning, for my breakfast.
The baking time should be determined experimentally. In my microwave oven, the dough made of 500 g wheat flour is baked well in a glass vessel covered with a glass lid in a time of 14 minutes at 1000 W. One minute less or one minute more make little difference. The baking vessel must be large, to allow for expansion.
A basic bread can be made by putting 500 g wheat flour in a hemispherical glass bowl of suitable size (e.g. about 20 cm/8 inches in diameter), adding instant dry yeast (here sold in 7 g bags suited for 500 g flour) to the flour, mixing the yeast with the flour, adding water about 75% of the flour weight, and then kneading the dough.
For this amount, kneading needs about 6 to 7 minutes. I knead with one hand, keeping the bowl in the other hand. In this way, one hand remains clean, free of sticky dough. You need to keep around a pie spatula (or a spoon, if you do not have a pie server), to be able to remove the sticky dough from your kneading hand, when you finish. The kneading should stop when the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and cohesive. After you do it a few times, it becomes easy to recognize when it is ready.
Then you can transfer the dough from the bowl into the baking vessel and leave it to rest and grow. For maximum growing, you may let the dough rest for an hour, but if in a hurry you can bake it earlier without much difference in the final product.
For the best growing, the dough should stay in a warm place. While I knead the dough, I boil water for tea in the microwave oven. Then, when the dough is ready, I take out the glass teapot and I put the baking vessel on the now warm plate of the microwave oven. I close the oven and one hour later I press the button to start the baking.
It is also possible to make unleavened bread (by not adding yeast), which still grows in a microwave oven much more than traditional unleavened bread. Its main advantage is that it can be ready faster. To make the bread fast, one can also use baking powder instead of yeast, which allows skipping over the resting time. The bread made with baking powder grows well, but it has a more compact and much finer structure than the bread made with yeast.
To the basic bread, there are a myriad possible additions. Most people want salted bread, so salt should be added to the flour, together with the yeast. You can add various spices, seeds or ground seeds. Some spices are best combined with sugar, but this should not be done everyday. With the exception of salt, I prefer to not add anything else uniformly but to lay flat and thin the dough, deposit on it layers of spices, seeds, sugar etc., then roll the dough to incorporate the additions and form it in the baking vessel. In this way, the bread will have alternate layers of plain bread with spices or seeds, so that a smaller quantity of those will produce a taste as intense as a greater quantity that would have been dispersed uniformly in the bread.
I used to hate dough sticking on my fingers so I started making no-knead bread. Usually that's made with sourdough but it turns out it works just fine with yeast also (I use instant dry yeast).
I make an 80% hydration dough with strong white, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal rye and give it a few good pulls every 15 minutes. I wet my fingers first and I get almost no dough sticking on them, even in the first few pulls when the dough is the most mushy. I shape it after a couple of hours (depending on how it's going), let it proof for a half-hour and bake it. I get a very healthy oven spring that way especially for a 2/3s wholemeal bread. All thanks to our little fungal friends who essentially do the kneading for me.
I need to figure out the baking though, or perhaps the hydration, because it ends up a bit too humid inside even after 35 minutes baking at close to the oven's max (which should be around 250 C).
The majority of the store-bought bread around here has much more than a small amount, though. It has enough that you can taste it, and it's not usually one of the last ingredients in the list on the package. (I'm counting high fructose corn syrup and the like as "sugar" here.)
