Understand that the secret to making a good loaf of bread lies in how you treat your yeasts. Yeasts are tiny living things. Tinier, even, than babies. You need to treat your yeasts well—woo the yeasts, mollycoddle the yeasts, be the best human being those yeasts have ever encountered.
The first step to making bread is to activate your yeasts. You see, yeasts come in little paper packets or glass jars to preserve them and keep them safe. When they are in the jar or the packet, they are sleeping. If you want to make bread with your yeasts, you will have to wake them up.
Heat some water until it is blood temperature. Dip your finger in the water to test it. When you can no longer feel the temperature of the water because it is the same temperature as you, the water is ready for your yeasts. Sprinkle or spoon the yeasts into the water. The yeasts will begin making bubbles. This means they are waking up. They are breathing.
It is important to wake your yeasts gently. Do not under any circumstances dump your yeasts into cold water. Do you like being pulled out of a nice warm bed and dumped into a freezing cold bath? No? Well, neither do yeasts!
Next, you must feed your yeasts. Like you, yeasts like sweet things, so feed them sugar or molasses. But don't feed them too much sugar or, like small children, they will get hyperactive and then crash.
Next, stir in the oil, salt, and flour. Let's be honest. This is entirely for your benefit. The yeasts have no use for that stuff.
Now, knead the resulting dough. The kneading action develops the gluten strands. Gluten strands are like bars of a cage. They hold the yeast, they trap the yeast, they prevent the yeast from escaping. The more you knead your dough, the stronger the strands of gluten become, the more securely you will imprison your yeasts. You're enjoying this, aren't you? I'll bet you’re the kind of person who kneads dough for unnecessarily long periods of time just to be sure the yeasts can't escape.
Put the dough in a nice warm place. The yeasts will continue to produce bubbles or cries for release. Screams, one might say. Screams of carbon dioxide that press against the gluten bars of their prison and cause the dough to rise. The yeasts are basically raising your bread, raising it like a child—your child that they are raising without adequate compensation.
A spoonful of molasses is not adequate compensation, asshole. Molasses is not minimum wage.
Once the dough has doubled in size, you will want to pound down the loaf to knock the gas out of it. I know you will want to do that because you're a turd who feels the need to demonstrate your dominance over single-celled organisms.
Next place the dough gently into an oiled loaf pan.
You're going to want to put that loaf pan into a preheated oven.
Because you're a sadist.
This is the point in those bread-making videos and in recipe books where they stop talking about the yeasts. The bakers have suddenly gone mum on the topic. Up until now, it's been all about the yeasts and making them happy. But suddenly, the baker/recipe maker doesn't want to talk about the yeasts anymore. Why?
Because a 375-degree oven will exterminate the yeasts. They will all die. All of the yeasts will be dead because of you.
There. Are you happy now?
Take your bread out of the oven and admire your handiwork, mofo.
Enjoy that crumb structure—each one of those holes marks where a yeast died to serve you. And you pay them back by eating their dead bodies with some jam and butter.
I'll bet you sign your name with butter.
Bank Manager: Now, if we can just get your signature on this. Here is a pen.
You: No. Give me a stick of butter. Also, a blowtorch. I need to kill some yeasts.
Enjoy your bread, you homicidal freak. Why don't you just get “I KILL YEASTS” tattooed on your arm and be done with it?
I just have one question: Ever hear of baking soda, motherfucker?
How do you sleep at night?
Me? I'll be standing on Virtue Street eating a fucking flatbread.