Hi foodies,

 

Welcome back to another of my “Experiments in Kitchen” posts. Today it is Whole Wheat Bread. After failed three attempts in past, we finally baked one at home. Here is our experience from that day of making a bread at home.

 

Whole Wheat Bread

 

We had always wanted to try making bread once in our oven. I have even tried two youtube and one blog recipes for baking a loaf of bread at home in the past. None of them worked for us. Once it was very hard to even bite into. Another time it was burnt. And last time it tasted awful. This “Whole Wheat Bread” recipe from “Jenny Can Cook“ is the recipe that my husband suggested. She made making bread easy in her video. And we decided to give our bread making another try using her recipe.

 

Changes

 

Absolutely no changes as I had all the ingredients required for the recipe. But we didn’t have an electric mixer like the one she uses in her video which reduces the dough making time. So we used our electric hand mixer initially. But had to use our hands later to knead the dough. She gave 50 turns to her dough. We gave the dough 150 turns to compensate the lack of the machine. 

 

Let’s Begin

 

As the recipe called for the egg to be at room temperature, we first took out the egg from the fridge at placed it in our pocket. The second requirement was warm milk. For this, we microwaved the milk in the microwave for 1 minutes and left it to cool down until we gathered other ingredients. You can find the whole list of ingredients and their quantities in the recipe below.

 

 

First, we added the whole wheat flour to our bowl. Followed by all purpose flour, sugar, salt, and yeast.

 

 

 

 

 

Then we used the hand mixer at the lowest setting to mix in together the dry ingredients.

 

 

Next, we added the first wet ingredient milk to the dry mixture and used the hand mixer to mix it in.

 

 

Then we added the egg and oil and mixed them well in the dough using the electric mixer.

 

 

We continued mixing the dough until it became paste-like. After which it was clear we needed to use hand to mix in the flour remaining on the sides of the bowl.

 

 

After mixing the dough with hands and scraping the flour from the sides of the bowl, we mix in some additional all-purpose flour. This additional flour makes the dough less sticky. And later helps in transferring the dough to a floured surface. Then we transferred the dough to our wooden board dusted with flour. The dough was still a little sticky at this point.

 

 

Now we start giving the turns. We used some flour after every fifty turns. After the first fifty turns the dough started to become smooth and less sticky. And by 150 turns, it had the smooth and shiny texture. We gave oval shape to the dough and covered it with a cloth. Then let it rest for next 10 minutes for the first rise. (We covered it full with cloth not like the half as shown in the picture.)

 

 

 

After ten minutes, we rolled the dough flat using hands and a little flour. At this time we used too much flour. And ended up doing few more turns to amalgamate that extra flour into the dough. After flattening the dough we started rolling it from on side until we reached the other end. Then we tucked the end and sealed the dough. And placed it inside the bread pan. Covered the dough with a cloth and placed it inside the oven (turned off right now) for the next 35 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After 35 minutes, the bread dough had risen to around one inch above the height of the pan just like Jenny predicted in her video. We took the pan out of the oven. And we started oven to preheat to 375 F/180 C.

 

 

Once the oven was preheated, we placed the bread pan in the oven for 30 minutes. After around 15 minutes into baking, we placed a foil tent over the bread to prevent over browning of bread from the top. 

After 30 minutes, this is how the bread looked. Beautiful isn’t it? There was a very appetizing aroma of freshly baked bread in the whole home. We waited few minutes before taking it out of the pan. Perfect Golden Brown in color, at least it looked perfect to us. 

 

 

 

Here’s how the bread looked from inside.

 

 

Look at the texture! When we were cutting into the bread there was that crunch on the outside. And from inside the bread was very soft and fluffy.

I tasted the first slice with peanut butter on it. It was delicious. My first taste of freshly baked bread just out of the oven. It is an accomplishment for us. One more recipe ticked off our list. 

 

 

 

How was it?

 

Oh man! we still couldn’t believe, we baked whole wheat bread. But we did. This whole post is dedicated to that event only. This recipe gave us the perfect bread. The bread was soft in the middle and crunchy on the outside and tasted like the bread we buy from market. Although it took us more than two hours to finally get this bread, the whole effort was totally worth it. We are going to make this one again for sure. It was so good that we finished the whole bread in three days. After the first day, we wrapped the whole bread into plastic wrap and placed in the cupboard.

 

For the next time

 

Although this recipe is perfect as it is, we would like to optimize this recipe to make two loaves. As that will last for a week if we plan to make bread at home.

 

 

 

Have you ever baked bread? Or thought of baking one just for fun?

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Cooking!