It's the weekend? Must be time to make the bread!

Each weekend since this last fall I've been baking bread.  This has become a necessity as the girls have grown and have a strict 30 minute period of the morning where interrupting their toast consumption is strictly verboten.  Ever bothered to look at the ingredient list of the bread at the store?  Any bread that is reasonably priced (read: not made by some patchouli smelling hippy with a cadre of too-cool-for-school eco-elves) has a list that often numbers nearly twenty separate items, many of which aren't even food.  The biggest issue we have is with the corn syrup, and not because it is sugar, but because it is insanely processed sugar that supports several industries that are wasteful and overall harmful to sustainable agricultural practices.  That aside, paying four dollars for something that my family could eat during a single day is PAINFUL. 

So our solution is to make it at home, which sounds daunting, at least it did to me, but it turns out it is ridiculously simple, and once you hit your stride, it ain't no thang.  We started with a bread maker, which was simple and effective before the girls.  The single loaf it yielded was not time effective though, and when the teflon started to scratch on that, I abandoned it and jumped feet first into making several loaves simultaneously.  I started with modifying the bread maker recipe for french bread that I had been using.  I will not bore you with the details, but let me just tell you that I wished I had spent time during chemistry paying attention rather than day dreaming about a certain red head.  I wanted to use whole wheat flour and that, my friends, is where the trouble started.  After many bricks of bread that even the birds wouldn't eat, I finally hit upon the secret: HONEY.

That's not bullshit.... I think it has something to do with the honey being very easy for the yeast to digest and hence the dough rises like gang-busters.  We have many local sources of honey, so its been another good way to support the local economy and decrease our dependence on the big box places.  Honey isn't cheap, no matter where you get it, but it's the trick to making yummy whole wheat bread. 

The other thing I THOUGHT you needed to use was SOFT Red wheat... the whole explanation on wheat belongs on another post, but in short there are two common kinds of wheat, one is HARD Red Wheat, the other is SOFT Red wheat, which make up the bulk of what you buy in the store.  SOFT Red Wheat is marketed as WHITE WHOLE WHEAT, and for my money you can't get better than King Arthur's.  Well we ordered a ton of the Organic White Whole Wheat from a buying club and I cracked into the first five pound bag today.... it wasn't until after the last pan was in the oven to rise that I looked at the package and realized it said it was milled from HARD WHITE Wheat... so WTF do I know about anything?  Apparently the HARD WHITE wheat is another strain that is easier to use for baking due to lack of certain proteins blah blah blah. The take away point here is you can use whole wheat flour in the entire recipe if you choose something that is either SOFT RED or of the WHITE wheat variety.  Though I didn't know it, this flour made awesome bread.

Enough with the jibber jabber.... here it is:

TEAMLIBBY'S BEST WHOLE WHEAT BREAD

1. 3 1/4 cup WHOLE WHEAT flour
2. 4 tsp sugar
3. 2 tsp salt
4. 4 tsp yeast
5. 1 large overflowing tablespoon honey
6. 1 egg (NOT required, but I like it)
7. About 1 1/2 - 1 2/3 cup warm water

Add all ingredients except for water to stand mixer, start it mixing.  Add water, going slowly.  You want your dough to be almost too moist to work with when it is ready to go into the pan.  I mix 4 loaves worth of the dry ingredients before starting, so the process is streamlined.  With your bread hook it should only take about 5-7 of kneading to be ready. Hand mold it into a smooth little log, throw it into the pan and mash it down to fill pan.  I keep a hot bowl of water in the oven and place them all in there one by one as they are done.  Should take about 45-50 minutes to rise.  Take out your bowl of water, turn the oven on 360 WITH the loaves still in there and set the timer for 50 minutes.  I don't wait for it to preheat and then add the loaves, but you might need to do it differently with your oven. 

Three loaves for the freezer, one for the bread box!

I can get all four loaves into the oven and rising in about 25 minutes... after that it's just standing by to stand by.  I've figured it out to about $1.75 a loaf, but it is probably close to $1.50 now that I am buying some of the ingredients in bulk.  Put them in large freezer bags and they'll keep for just about ever.  That's bread with a total of seven ingredients, all of which you can pronounce, and that tastes delicious.  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it WonderBread.













PS:  This is the perfect time to get a head start on dinner... altering the recipe a tiny bit yields two good size pizzas worth of dough.  Papa John, eat your heart out.

Finally put the stone back in the oven tonight and did it the right way.  If I can ever get my old man to build me a pizza/bread oven outside, you'd better believe that will warrant a few entries.


Cheers....J