Recipe: Making Daily Whole Wheat Bread

You’ll notice this post is titled “Making Daily Bread” and not “Making Bread Daily.” I’m a do-it-yourselfer, but I’m not a martyr. Some pioneers in the organic/local/sustainable food movement note that while, in some ways, people are going back to doing things they way their grandparents did — fresh, real food that’s made and sometimes even grown at home — in other ways, we are light years ahead because of scientific, technological and social advancements. These things are easier than they used to be.

For example, I can make steel cut oats in a jiffy (at least my part of the chore goes quickly) with my rice cooker. I can set up automatic drip irrigation systems for my raised beds. We can now easily use temporary electric fencing to rotate livestock through multiple grazing areas. And, like I’ll explain here, I’ve been using my bread machine to assist in that most basic of endeavors — making bread for our family’s daily use.

For quite a while, I’ve been in search of a method for mimicking certain characteristics of store-bought whole wheat bread. It should be fairly soft, easily sliceable (and toast-able), and suitable for sandwich-making. I finally found a recipe that’s satisfied me (and, crucially importantly, the family) and it has one other distinct advantage compared to others I’ve tried — it makes two loaves at once.

I can’t bake two loaves at a time in the bread machine, but it gives me an extra loaf to freeze while we’re going through the first one. So it’s not bread-making daily. At our rate of consumption, it turns out to be more like weekly. Since it requires so little hands-on time, it’s doable for a working mom like me. (I store the currently-in-use bread loaf in a gallon Ziploc freezer bag, and start cooking the next batch when the last loaf is halfway gone.)

The recipe I use is based on one I found on An Oregon Cottage, with a few tweaks. I originally started making this by using my KitchenAid stand mixer, but I only have the basic model, and it started to balk at kneading whole wheat bread after a while. (The smell of a mixer motor getting hot is not a nice kitchen aroma.)

So, I decided to use an appliance made for kneading bread — my bread machine. Though it makes two loaves, the machine is able to handle it pretty easily on the “dough” setting. After that, I just turn the dough into two standard 5×9 loaf pans and bake it in the oven. (I tried the toaster oven on the convection setting once, and, though ours is pretty big, the top of the bread burned a little.)