Real bread is made from yeast. Soda is used for "quick breads", which are more like coffee cake.
If you're going to make bread often, head to Costco or Sam's Club, and buy yeast in bulk. It's *much* cheaper than in those foil packets. They have both active dry yeast and "instant" yeast in bulk at Costco; I'd recommend instant.
Costco and Sam's Club are also good places to buy bread flour. Their big bags are about the same price as a 5 pound bag at the supermarket.
Start off by putting 1.5 or 2 tablespoons of yeast in 2 cups of warm water, maybe 100F. Toss in a tablespoon of sugar, and a tablespoon of flour. Stir. Put this aside. In ten minutes, you should see activity that indicates the yeast is working. If you don't, you need new yeast. (When you buy bulk yeast, store it in mason jars in the fridge, with the lids tight so you don't get any moisture. It will keep a year or more.)
In a big mixing bowl (I use a stainless bowl about 24 inches across) mix 2/3 cup of sugar, 1.5 teaspoons of salt, and six cups of bread flour. Mix this stuff all up, because it's easy to mix when stuff is dry. (If you want to make herbal bread, now is the time to add the herbs.)
Add that frothy water from the cup, and mix stuff up. It will get terribly sticky and you'll have to use your hands. Mix in a piece of lard about the size of a golf ball. You can use vegetable oil instead of lard, but you won't get the wonderful crusty crust that lard gives you.
At some point, the dough will be pretty much formed, and it will be hard to work it within the bowl. Turn the dough out onto a hard surface that's been lightly powdered with flour. Knead the dough for a while, adding lard as needed, until you have a uniform ball that's semi-greasy on the outside.
Wash and dry that stainless steel bowl, and plop the bread in there. Cover it with a damp cloth - a "calendar" towel is what I use - and put it somewhere warm until it's doubled in size. That should take no longer than an hour or two.
Punch the dough down. The dough was rising pretty fast, and that results in large pockets of air. Now that the rising has slowed down, you'll get smaller pockets. Knead it well, and divide it in half. Shape each half into a loaf and put it into a well-greased loaf pan. (This recipe really calls for 9x5 loaf pans. If you have the smaller loaf pans, make three loaves instead of two. Or simply form round loaves, and bake it as hearth bread on cookie sheets or a half-sheet cake pan.)
The bread will continue to rise. After an hour or two, it will be an inch or two above the loaf pans. Bake the bread at that point. It takes a 350F oven, about 30 minutes. When time is up, turn the loaves out of their pans onto wire racks.
If you want whole-wheat loaves instead of white, use a 50/50 mix of bread and whole-wheat flour. It will rise less. If you want a light rye loaf instead of white, use light rye flour. You can substitute honey for sugar if you want. I'd still use sugar in the glass of water with the yeast, though. Herbal breads, as mentioned earlier, turn out great. Some people slash the top of the loaves before they bake them. Some people coat the top of the loaves with butter, either at the start of baking, in the middle of baking, or when pulling the loaf out of the pan. I don't.
If you have this recipe for bread, you don't really need any other - you can just head off in any direction from here.
Been baking this bread, in different forms (my favorite is honey rye, using light rye flour) for 35 years, and it's always gotten raves, yet it's simple....