I've had similar complaints with bread recipes, but I've been using Peter Reinhardt's bread baking books for a while now, and he always includes directions with non-mechanized utensils, like wooden spoons, etc. His recipes are also fantastic, which helps. The bread baker's apprentice is particularly good at explaining all the necessary steps for good bread, which has made me confident enough of a baker to trust my own skills and wooden spoon when I want to make a bread recipe that suggests using a stand mixer.

Get a good bread baking book (Reinhardt is one; Clayton is another) and learn the basic recipe for making bread by hand. You can then use the same process for basically any bread recipe. As Trish1980 said, bread has been made by hand forever--you don't have to have a mixer to do it.

I definitely sympathize! I also don't own a stand mixer, although as soon as I can scrape together the funds I will buy myself one! But it is frustrating that so many recipes just assume that you have one now. I just have a hand mixer or a good old wooden spoon. I have to really understand what I am looking for in my doughs before I start so I get the right results!

I second the Bernard Clayton's "New Complete Book of Breads". It's got directions to do it by hand, with a stand mixer, or a food processor.

http://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Claytons-Complete-Book-Breads/dp/0743287096/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298647869&sr=8-1

I've been making bread for years without a stand mixer. One of life's pleasures is to hand knead -- it really gets out the stress. But I'm also a huge fan of no knead breads.

Just mix the dough by hand with a wooden paddle or large spoon, turning it out onto a floured countertop and knead by hand when it's too thick to stir. Simple. You don't need a new recipe. It'll take longer to get the gluten developed, but I'm sure you know this already.

I'd say double the time, if it says to machine mix for 5 minutes, mix by hand for 10, but the best indicator is what the dough looks and feels like, which you'll learn in time.

This is FABULOUS! Thanks to all for the resources. The book suggestions look great. I checked out Clayton's book on Amazon and I like how he has instructions for all methods of bread baking. I am searching for a bread baking class in my area but so far I have not turned up anything, so I guess I'll have to dive in and experiment by myself.

Recipes advance with the technology. Look at cookbooks printed 20 years ago and no one mentions immersion blenders, stand or hand-held mixers, food processors. If you have the equipment, then the methods in the recipes are more efficient. The people writing their recipes won't publish two cookbooks, one telling you to hand whip, chop by hand, cream butter and sugar by hand (which is what they used to do before mixers) etc. when they know you'll use your appliance?

Buy The Bread Bible by Beth Hensperger. Great recipes, and 90% of the book is for recipes made by hand. The last 10% is recipes modified to work with modern technology.

My Gran, my mother, me and a friend of mine all are bread baking fanatics and NONE of us consider using a mixer to bake bread!

Flour, oil, water, yeast, salt, any seeds or flavourants - knead with your hands! The trick in kneading bread dough is pull then push, pull then push. repeat for 7-10 minutes, then cover your dough and place in a sunny spot. My gran used to cover her dough with a plastic bag, then a blanket. Her cat would then lie on it, which heat-activates the yeast. Follow instructions above on shaping the dough.

This seems like such a silly question to ask. People don't question "can I make whipped cream without a stand mixer" Sure! Just use a whisk and a bit of elbow grease. Same with bread and everything made by a stand mixer!

I love mine, but before I had it, I whipped meringues, buttercreams, batters, made bread- you name it- by hand! It's not rocket science, it's how people did it since we knew how to bake bread! I still knead bread by hand- never a dough hook.

I rarely encounter recipes that soley use stand mixer instructions. Usually it says mix til a smooth elastic dough forms or a description of the dough itself...and you knead it til it does that. If you really need a conversion, roughly double the knead time.

Bread has been around before electricity so you can definitely go without the stand mixer. What takes 5 minutes to knead in a mixer will take about 10-20 minutes of good hand kneading. Really dig your palms in there. The act of kneading in or out of the mixer is to develop the gluten so don't skimp on muscle or time.

There are a lot of videos on youtube showing different techniques. You should also check out The Fresh Loaf website. They rarely have recipes that require a stand mixer. Any books by Reinhardt will also have a great deal of information to help you with being a great baker.

Perhaps it's a little too hippie or old skool now, but I highly recommend the Tassajara Bread Book, which you can find used for about $4 (or less!). This is how I learned to bake bread, and the book was written before stand mixers were even a gleam in most home cooks' eyes.

The recipes are very straightforward and very flexible; most importantly, they make bread into less of a science than many of the bread bibles written more recently. Once you've made a few loaves with a method like this, you may find you're more interested in investigating the ones with very precise proportions, etc. Or not.

(As it happens, you can see the basic recipe for yeasted bread as well as quite a lot of the book on Google Books!!)

Jaime Olivers website (and his books) have many recipes for bread and dough that direct you to mix by hand rather than with machine.

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, by Laurel Robertson, has a particularly detailed and helpful set of instructions (illustrated!) for kneading bread by hand, in the "Loaf for Learning" recipe. The book focuses on 100% whole grain breads and is excellent for beginners.

This may be entirely unhelpful, as I am suggesting one type of technology to replace another, but you can also use a food processor. See Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. You just have to be more careful than usual not to over-knead. My stand mixer has been in the repair shop for over a month now so I have, by necessity, explored other options. Also the no-knead options are great; I am currently loving the Tartine Bread method (you can find the book or also find the recipe on Martha Stewart's website--This weekend I'll be posting my experiences with it on my blog at www.threecleversisters.com).

I am a totally obsessed bread baker--I bake between two and four batches of breads a week. I almost NEVER use my stand mixer.

I really think the days of long-kneading bread are a thing of the past. You can achieve as good or even better results with hand stretching and folding and just letting the dough rest in between.
The infamous "No-Knead" bread formula and technique is an excellent teacher of this point and a great starting place for beginners.

Less kneading goes hand in hand with another shift in the bread world as we (meaning in the U.S.) have gotten into artisan breads--working with higher hydration doughs.
The days of that stiff bread dough that it wears your arms out to work with are done.

Kneading isn't much work unless your dough is dry and hard instead of soft and sticky. Just keep pushing it until it gets less stick and more elastic. Do a windowpane test: take a piece of the dough and if you can stretch it out until it's nearly see-through, then it's ready to sit on the table for it's fermentation time before molding into pans.

look for a video on the guardian.co.uk site featuring Richard Bertinet. the basic recipe and method is now my go-to-recipe. :)

(I think there are also videos on the gourmet website.)

You need a stand mixer to make bread as much as you need an automatic stirrer to mix your milk into your coffee. Seriously!

http://bottomupfood.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/stop-being-scared-of-baking-bread/

@melle

Thanks for sharing the "windowpane test"! I always wonder whether my dough has been (hand)kneaded enough, this is a good thing to know!

I second @shipwrecks re: Richard Bertinet.

His books, "Dough" and "Crust" are geared for making bread without a mixer. I use his method exclusively now. Simplicity itself.

As others have said, pretty much any bread recipe can be made without machinery of any kind. My favorite is this crusty french boule recipe (http://vanillaandlace.blogspot.com/2010/03/chewy-crusty-french-boule.html)... scroll to the bottom (before the comments) for the hand-kneading instructions. Yum!

The best bread I've been making lately is from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It doesn't require any kneading at all! It's so delicious my family fights over it.

Chuck Hughes at cookingchanneltv.com has a great no-knead bread recipe. I made it and it was pretty easy and very hearty and tasty.

No, you cannot make bread without a stand mixer. Before stand mixers were invented there was no such thing as bread. People chewed wheat kernels and downed them with large glasses of water that they extracted from tears because there were no water faucets. Then one day, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison decided to invent these things. Then Erma Rombauer figured out how to make bread with a stand mixer, but only after Julia Child taught her how to grind wheat between two stones.

Ha Charlotte! I was thinking the same thing while reading the OP and many of the responses.

Stand mixers make kneading easier, of course, but kneading is still kneading, however you do it. My 8th graders make both bread and pizza dough by hand. No mixers involved. Just stainless mixing bowls and wooden spoons.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of Google can figure out how to knead bread by hand. There is no magic the mixer puts into the dough to make it bread.

I third (or fourth?) Bernard Clayton's book. I've got an older edition from the 80s that I found at a thrift store, but it's really good - he does divide the recipes up into instructions for hand mixing, with a stand mixer, and with an electric mixer.

My favorite of his recipes is Old Order Amish bread - a soft white sandwich bread (not Wonderbread soft, though) with great flavor that requires no milk or butter. Here's my link: http://citygirlcountryfood.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/old-order-amish-bread/

It's only the third kind of yeast bread I've ever tried - the first being sweet hot milk-type dinner rolls and the second being a seriously dense and deliciously whole-grain-y Icelandic Brown bread.

I must instinctively know how to knead bread, because I have no idea where I learned (watching Julia Child or someone maybe?). But once you get a rhythm and with the right table/counter height, it's a breeze. My counters are a bit to high, but I just go up on my tippy toes for the down-thrust of the kneading.

Yeast bread is easier than you think. You just need time and some clean counter space. Good luck!

Like many of the posters above, I do my bread by hand. In college, I didn't have the funds or space for a mixer, and now, the quiet handwork is soothing. I like the better feel for the dough that I get too.
But I do want to point out - while books and other tools can be handy, you really don't need anything special. I use a glass bowl (as bread doesn't seem to rise in plastic), a pyrex measuring glass for the milk and butter, and my hand.

I would like to strongly second the Tassajara Bread Book recommendation. Even if you don't want to use their specific recipe, the instructions will teach you how to "really" make bread. The instructions are extremely detailed and easy to understand and follow. More importantly you will fully understand the basic techniques involved in bread making once you have tried it once or twice.
Plus, if you want to make 100% whole wheat bread nothing beats the basic recipe. I mean nothing!

http://www.farmgirlfare.com/2011/01/farmhouse-white-easy-basic-white.html

She explains things step by step and helps build confidence to a novice breadmaker.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can't you just easily figure out how to convert the recipe? All you would do, I imagine, is instead of mixing it for X minutes on Y speed, just mix it in a bowl and knead it by hand. How hard is that?

Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day will change your life. No joke.