I spent weeks looking for a recipe for bread when I suddenly realized that the invention of bread precedes the invention of writing, and there are large swaths of European history when the people who baked the bread and the people who knew how to read didn't even speak to each other very much (I take no responsibility for the factualness, or not, of these insights). So I could ignore all the recipes that made two loaves or had ingredients I regarded as weird or extraneous.

A loaf of bread, it turns out, is a pound of flour, 10 grams of instant yeast or some other type yeast with equivalent leavening power, a pinch of salt, maybe a tablespoon or so of something sweet to feed the yeast with (sugar, malt syrup, molasses, whatever), and enough water to make the dough look like dough (bottled or filtered, please, lest the chlorine kill the yeast). That's it. You're done. If you're using a sourdough starter you don't even need to add the yeast—just remember that some of the flour will already be in the starter.

You can play around with this by using different kinds of flour, different sweeteners, different kinds of salt (I guess, my exotic salt I got from Amazon was stolen from my apartment building foyer) or whatever, but that's all you need.