If you haven’t baked bread before and want a great starting recipe, try Jim Laney’s no-knead bread.
Some tips:
1. You can halve the amount of salt. (1 bakers’ percent of salt is plenty. I don’t know why most recipes call for 2%.)
2. Active dry yeast is obsolete, but that doesn’t stop it from being prominently sold in grocery stores. Get instant yeast instead. SAF Red or SAF Gold are excellent choices. Instant yeast will work in a recipe written for active dry yeast, but active dry yeast may not work in a recipe written for instant yeast.
3. Get a scale and use it.
4. You don’t actually need King Arthur Bread Flour, but you should use a high quality bread flour. I experimented once (quite a while ago), and IIRC Gold Medal worked well and Pillsbury was okay. King Arthur does make a consistent product, which is nice.
Pretty much any of Ken Forkish's recipes. Linked below is one that I find really accessible and a great intro for folks new to bread baking who want to get a bit more into the finesse side of the experience. The way the dough is handled is important, I've found, since it's very easy to overwork it. Ken does a good job of describing the process.
If you were to buy only one bread book, I would highly recommend _Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast_.
That’s a good book and has lots of good recipes, but…
IMO autolyze is at best a minor improvement compared to just not doing it (maybe called “fermentolyze” in this context). (In my experience at least some degree of pre-kneading/aggressive mixing rest makes a big difference, but this recipe and Laney’s no-knead don’t do that.) But autolyze is quite the complication, especially for new bakers making simple bread! With the autolyze step, you have the complication of trying to mix yeast and salt into dough, which is not so easy. Without the autolyze step, you just mix the dry ingredients, stir, and add water.
So I wouldn’t recommend this recipe as a first serious bread for a new baker.
My favorite is Russian Borodinsky bread with caraway seed. You can find a standard GOST recipe for it online, but be warned that it's a 48 hour process that includes scalding the dough.
