The best fluffy white bread recipe

This is a bread recipe which shows how to make a fluffy white loaf of bread using a simple set of ingredients.

🍞 Fluffy White Bread Introduction

My version of fluffy white bread. It comes out as a fresh bread loaf perfect every time. We love it in our house. I make this bread more than twice a week and use it as our sandwich loaf. There is no real need to buy a loaf of bread any more because of this recipe!

It tastes best when it is freshly made but can last a couple of days too. I also freeze it to make sure there are always a few slices available for toast.

This recipe is a great foundation to start your bread adventure on and incorporates the basic ingredients to make a loaf of bread. Plenty of the recipes on my site use this as a basic recipe but can be cooked in various ways such as in a Pullman loaf pan or used with extra ingredients to make a speciality bread.

Familiarise yourself with the methods in this post and my guide to breadmaking to help learn the joys of baking home made bread.

Contents

• 🍞 Fluffy White Bread Introduction
• 👨‍🍳 Ingredients for a fluffy loaf
• 🥄 Instructions for making a tasty loaf of fluffy white bread
• 🏃‍♂️ A quick fluffy white bread recipe
• Working with sticky dough
• Non Stick Bread Tins
• Use this fluffy white bread recipe elsewhere
• Fluffy white bread maker bread
• 🥪 Try this fresh bread with...
• ❔ Did you make this soft white bread recipe? Did you get a light loaf?
• The Recipe
• Your Comments

👨‍🍳 Ingredients for a fluffy loaf

There are a small set of ingredients to make a basic loaf of bread. As you can see from the section below, some additional ingredients are what make it a fluffy white loaf.

Basic bread ingredients

• Bread flour - The staple ingredient of a loaf of bread. In the US they call it unbleached flour. In the UK we don't have additives or any of that, we like just unfettered ingredients from the mill. For this recipe it's white bread flour that you need.
• Yeast - I'm a big fan of the Allinson's easy bake instant yeast. That works well. You can also use fresh yeast if you wish. The yeast is part mixed with some water in this recipe to enable it to begin working quickly. This is not a necessary step and you can use dried yeast in the mix and it will begin to work when the water is added.
• Salt - Table salt will be perfectly acceptable. It's nice and smooth and mixes well.
• Water - Use luke warm water (around 30C) to make up the dough. I like to use water from the kettle which has been left to cool down to the right temperature. You can add some cold tap water to reduce the temperature further if needed.

To make it a fluffy loaf

• Sugar - Standard granulated sugar is fine for this recipe or you can use brown sugar too. If you wish to achieve the same effect but have a slightly healthier loaf then replace the sugar with 1 tablespoon of honey.
• Butter - Use melted butter or stork margarine. To melt it, add to a bowl and microwave for 10 to 15 seconds. You can get away with not melting it too if you are mixing using a stand mixer.

Enriching the dough with an oil (butter) and also sugar is what makes the loaf fluffy and well risen. The butter can be mixed in by hand without melting it and throughout the kneading process it will break down. I'm just lazy and it's a bit of extra effort so I prefer to melt in advance.

For detailed amounts of ingredients, check out the recipe card at the bottom of the post.

🥄 Instructions for making a tasty loaf of fluffy white bread

In a jug mix the yeast well with 96g of water. The water should be luke warm which means around 30-40C. Too hot and the yeast will be killed. Too cold and it won't start working, so be careful with getting this right for a successful light loaf. Leave it for 10 minutes to mix properly and start working. If it's working properly you should see some bubbles starting to develop. Active yeast is important to getting this fluffy white bread recipe being an actually fluffy light loaf.

Mix ingredients

🇺🇸 In the mixing bowl, place 3 cups of flour, butter, sugar and yeast mix. Start mixing in gently. To measure your flour out, I recommend using a quality cups measuring set such as this stainless steel set available online. These are dishwasher safe and will be useful for measuring various quantities of liquids or dry ingredients.

🇬🇧 For those of us in the UK that prefer grams for weighing out flour, this recipe calls for 500g of flour. The cups version is 4 to 5 cups in total (with 1 cup of flour being about 120g) so we work it out that way. In the instructions at the foot of the page, aim for 500g flour and 350ml water.

Pour in the rest of the water and mix. Then gradually pour in the salt. Ideally the salt should go in as late as possible to avoid it from stopping the yeast from working. To be successful with this soft white bread recipe, the salt needs to be added as late in the mixing process as possible so as not to kill off the active yeast.

If the mix has gone disastrously wrong, take a look at my bread dough hydration calculator to get a ballpark figure or flour to water amounts that you should be using.

Knead the dough - by hand

Now the skills are required. You need to add in another 1 - 2 cups of flour to bring the dough to a mailable but not dry mix. Too wet and it becomes impossible to handle, too dry and it won't rise nicely. Be patient with getting this right, it might take a few goes at baking bread but it is worth it once you get your mojo and you can bake a light loaf no problem.

Keep kneading the mix until you get a strong dough which gives back a bit when stretching it. Can take up to 10/15 mins for it to come together (sometimes more/sometimes less).

Kneading the dough - stand mixer

Obviously this process can be made a whole lot easier if you are making your soft light loaf dough in a food mixer otherwise known as a stand mixer. There are lots of versions around varying in price. My stand mixer of choice is the Kenwood K-Mix which has a 5 litre bowl, perfect for our family of three. You can buy larger stand mixers with bigger bowls such as this Vospeed Stand Mixer but the quality of the Kenwood is what sold me, so pick depending on your need. Choose a food mixer with a dough hook to make this part of the process easy.

When mixing, use a lower setting (Level 1 on the Kenwood) for around 5 minutes and then rest the dough for 5 minutes. Then move to a higher setting (level 2 on the Kenwood) for another 5 minutes and the dough should be smooth and ready for proving.

Proving the dough

Once you have dough, cover the mixing bowl and leave the dough to rise until it is doubled in size. This can take up to ⅔ hours in the UK, but also quick (45 mins if it's warm). It helps to have a good selection of mixing bowls available in order to make sure you have the right size for the amount of dough you will make when it rises.

🏃‍♂️ A quick fluffy white bread recipe

It is possible to double up the recipe and then freeze one of the loaves. A quick tip - before freezing the loaf, slice the bread up. Then when you need just one or two slices of bread, grab them from the freezer and blast them for 10 seconds in the microwave.

When making my dough for this soft white bread recipe I vary between using the mixer or kneading by hand. The key to a good strong dough takes time to work out, but when it is ready it should look smooth and not stringy. It should give a bit of resistance when pulling it and will make a light loaf.

My comprehensive guide to breadmaking goes in to more detail about proving and shaping so be sure to check that out.

Working with sticky dough

One thing to bear in mind with this fluffy white bread recipe dough mix is that it is a fairly wet dough. Handling it takes a bit of getting used to. In order to handle wet dough without it sticking to you try:

• Wetting your hands with water
• Rubbing some olive oil on your hands will allow you to handle a sticky dough for a light loaf

Either of the above methods should help keep the dough from sticking to you. A chopstick or spatula will help scrape off any excess you may have. For a successful soft white bread recipe the dough should not be dry, and it should be sticky.

Once you get used to working with wetter doughs, then you can move on to more advance bread bakes such as the French baguette or crusty bread rolls. You could even have a go at baking a sourdough bread recipe.

Non Stick Bread Tins

Choosing the right kind of tin to put cook your bread in is obviously a key part to making things cook nicely and work out. Check out these options for non stick bread tins. Get a good quality tin to ensure your bread does not tear up when trying to get it out of the tin.

Use this fluffy white bread recipe elsewhere

This fluffy white bread recipe can be made into either one large soft loaf of bread or you can make it into 10 or so smaller bread rolls. A bread roll can be used to complement one of our air fryer or slow cooker recipes to add a nice smaller light loaf side snack.

Fluffy white bread maker bread

This is one of the great bread maker recipes UK style. Throw the ingredients in and make your bread maker do all the work!

You can also use this soft white bread recipe to make smaller hot dog rolls or burger buns to go with one of my BBQ recipes.

🥪 Try this fresh bread with...

❔ Did you make this soft white bread recipe? Did you get a light loaf?

Leave me a comment and tell me how this soft white bread recipe worked for you? Was your bread a nice light loaf or did you have to try a few times? Would you recommend our soft white bread recipe to your friends?

The Recipe