How the fuck do I knead

I love baking, but I'm limited to cakes and anything batter-based because everytime I lay my hands on a ball of dough it instantly quadruples in density and brittleness and never comes out like pic related. What do? Any non-fuckupable doughs I could practice with?

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make no-knead bread
/thread

Use a stand up mixer with a dough hook attachment.

Sounds like you're using too much flour. When you measure the flour, are you packing it down into the measuring cup? If so, don't. That can give you like 25% more flour per unit of volume than loosely spooning it into the measuring cup.

threading yourself makes you look like a real alpha friendo

I've been considering getting a stand mixer for ages now purely for ease's sake, but my kitchen's crowded as shit already. Are they worth it for the long run?

waitwaitwaitwait hol' up

so the standard convention is to base recipes off of loosely scooped flour?
Everything makes sense now.

the standard for recipes is to mention when an ingredient needs to be packed in.
a stand mixer is the only reason i can tolerate baking. i also use it for salads and just eat out of the bowl because i'm lazy.

go to the Veeky Forums archive and search for baking generals for recipes. the flour, water, salt, and yeast book is good, but way too autistic for a beginner who just wants to make simple bread

get a digital scale and a bread machine. use dough setting for the dough, and bake in oven.

Mixing water and flour together will generate gluten strands in your dough without any baker intervention. This is the basis of no knead bread.

The purpose of kneading is encourage gluten development in your dough at a faster rate.

There's 3 ways we can develop gluten strands.
Autolyse - Mixing just the water and flour and nothing else to encourage gluten generation on its own (30mins - hours)
kneading - stretching and folding the dough in a short amount of time (10 - 15mins usually after mixing)
stretch and folds - stretching and folding the dough periodically over a longer period of time. (Every 30 minutes for around 4 hours). Dough gets more and more relaxed after each stretch fold which makes the dough stretchier and softer each time.

now to get stretchy dough like in the picture, you'll probably need to add less flour or more water. I take it you don't have a kitchen scale, otherwise you'll be able to accurately measure out the flour to water ratio. I'd recommend 75% water to flour if you do. 60% produces very dense breads and 80 produces kind of tricky to handle sloppy dough.

If you don't have a kitchen scale, I would use your existing recipe, but instead of adding all the flour at once, I'd add it a cup or a bit at a time, mix thoroughly with your hands. Continue this process until your dough is sticky but not sloshy like cake batter. Dough will stick to your hands, if its not its probably too dry. if its sloshing around like liquid, its too wet and could use a bit more flour. There's a fine line between dry dough and wet dough so you'll want to be careful how much you add when you're doing the final steps.
In short, I'd invest in a kitchen scale they're like 5 dollars on amazon.

No amount of kneading a dense brittle dough will make it stretchy, you will try to stretch it but it'll break. You'll try the windowpane test and it kind of works for a little bit but breaks. I've been there.

good luck.

Why the fuck would you buy a bread machine just to make dough and then bake it in the oven?

If you are going to spend all that money on a bread machine just use it to make the bread or even better don't buy one.