Soaked Wheat Bread

My friend Jenny sent me a link a while back to The Elliott Homestead blog.
If you're heading toward the whole foods way of eating to any extent you should check out her site.  It's an inspiration. One step at a time though!

I found her soaked wheat bread recipe and I've been making two loaves twice a week for the past month or so. I used freshly milled flour, with a a ratio of two parts hard red wheat to one part hard white wheat. This is our favorite bread right now.

You can find the recipe here.

Maple Oat Sandwich Bread

I've made this bread a number of times now and it's become my kids' favorite for sandwiches.  It works great in a bread machine, which really simplifies life for a mom, especially if you've got other fish to fry that day. Or kids. Or granola. Or yogurt or sauerkraut to try your hand at making. Yeah, I keep putting too many on my plate these days to try out.  There just isn't enough time in a day to get at all the great new foods I've been reading that I can start making at home!
One step at a time, self!

Back to the bread.
I modified an old bread machine recipe so as to work with milled flour, and what I came up with seems to be steadily coming out nicely. So I aint messing with it.

Maple Oat Sandwich Bread

Place liquid ingredients into the bread machine:

1 1/4 C + 1 TBS warm water
1/3 cup maple syrup  (I have this in my Amazon Subscribe and Save list so I save about $5 on it) 
1 TBS olive oil (not extra virgin)


Then add the dry ingredients into the bread machine:

1 1/2 cups freshly milled hard white wheat flour
1 1/2 cups freshly milled hard red wheat flour
1 cup oats
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast (I used instant yeast, but I think active dry yeast would work as well)

I rarely bake my bread in the bread machine itself. I place my the setting to "dough" o that it does the kneading and rising cycles for you.  When the machine beeps (mine takes 2 hours to complete the dough cycle) I take the dough out and knead it slightly for maybe thirty seconds or so and get it into a nice loaf shape and place it into a greased bread pan (or a non-greased USA Pan ;) and let it sit (and rise) for twenty minutes or so while until the oven heats up and bake it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

I call it a good sandwich bread because it doesn't crumble and fall apart when I cut it up.
The slices actually hold their shape. Yes!

Whole Wheat Bagels

This recipe is from the Bread Beckers Recipe Collection.

This recipe uses freshly milled hard white wheat berries. My children have always liked store bought bagels but I stopped buying them a while ago. When I broke these homemade ones out one morning as a surprise, my kids were all so thrilled to have bagels again that none of them noticed the change to "whole wheat." I'm glad they were a hit.  (The cream cheese helped I think. :)

Whole Wheat Bagels

2 1/4 cup warm water
2 Tbs honey
2 1/4 tsp salt
5 cups freshly milled wheat flour (hard white)
1 Tbs. gluten (optional)*
2 tsp instant yeast

Combine water, honey, and salt. Add half the flour, yeast, and gluten and mix well.
Add remaining flour and knead to form a slightly stiff dough (about 8-10 minutes). Let rise until double, covering to keep don't from drying out.

Divide the risen dough into twelve pieces and shape into balls and allow to rest. In a large pot bring one gallon of water to a boil then add 1/3 cup honey to it. Working with only six balls at a time, take each ball and poke your thumb through the middle forming a hole, twirling each new bagel on your thumb to enlarge the hole until the hole is about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Let each bagel rest about five minutes, then place it in the boiling honey water. Cook two to three bagels at a time, adjusting the heat so the water is simmering all the time. While these cook, prepare your next six balls for the water. The bagels should sink, then rise in a few seconds; if they don't, they rested too long but are still fine. Just turn them over so that the both sides get wet. After one minute in the water remove with a slotted spoon and place on a greased cookie sheet.

Bake at once in a preheated oven at 425° for about 35 minutes. The bagels may be brushed with a mixture of 1 beaten egg and 2 tablespoons water then sprinkled with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, minced onions, or minced garlic before baking. The egg wash makes even ungarnished bagels shiny and pretty.

(* I didn't add the optional gluten into mine.)