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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Whole Wheat Bread


Why I made homemade bread:

-Store bought bread has preservatives.  Google "dangers of preservatives" and you will find lots of information on why you want to avoid them.  Here is one quote, "Preservatives are toxic and tumor-causing. Most impact the nervous system, changing behavior. Some have an impact on reproductive health or weaken the immune system."

-Store bought bread has sodium.  I don't mind it so much but my husband has hereditary high blood pressure and will not eat any store bought bread because of the salt content.

-Many store bought breads have high fructose corn syrup (although it is possible to find some without it if you look hard enough).


-Usually I cannot find any organic bread in stores, but with homemade bread, I can use organic ingredients.

Thus, my attempts at homemade bread.  I even went out and bought some 9x5 glass loaf pans.

Making it really isn't that hard but it just takes a lot of time because I don't have a bread machine.

Here is the recipe I tried today:  Simple Whole Wheat Bread

The recipe does call for both bread flour and whole wheat flour.  I went ahead and bought bread flour, because it said "Unbleached."  I thought that meant it would still be whole wheat...but when I opened the package it was pure white refined flour.  I don't want to waste that bag of flour so I went ahead and followed the recipe but I think next time, I will attempt it using only whole wheat flour.  Oh, also, I left out the salt. 

The nice thing about this recipe is that it makes THREE loaves.  So I can keep one loaf out and pop the other two in the freezer until needed.



Let the dough rise...


Then, punch it down.

Next you divide it into three loaves and let those rise.  Then you put them in the oven:


5 comments:

  1. I love baking bread from scratch! I had some difficulty finding a non-bread machine recipe that was also adaptable to soaking, though, until I had a stroke of genius. I looked up medieval bread recipes. :-D You can't get any more "real food" than that!

    The recipe is super simple but involves a lot more kneading than regular recipes, and the dough soaks up so much flour that the bread crumbs REALLY easily when sliced. The recipe is for white bread (it's called "fine manchet" ) which is period, but I adapted it to be 1/2 whole grain.

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  2. Oh wow, that was a very creative idea to look up medieval recipes!! I have heard about soaking grains but I'm not quite there yet.

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  3. Soaking is a bit of a pain if you like to do spur of the moment meal planning, but if you're lazy like me it's awesome. :-D Sounds weird, but it's nice to only have to stir 2 or 3 ingredients together, and then do that much less the next day. Of course, telling your husband that he'll have to wait a day to get his pancakes doesn't go over that well...

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  4. ...and....Lady Kay can make bread! wow, your bread looks BEauTIful!!!!! pass the butter...

    Thanks for visiting my blog today, LK!
    Love, Aunt Heidi
    If it's okay with you, I'm going to add you to my list of blogs I visit!

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