A little while back I made a post about bread
making and yogurt
making. Both posts can be largely forgotten as they shed very little light
on the process and they were more of a “look what I can do” type of post. My
girlfriend pointed this out to me but I didn’t want to harm my fragile ego so I
more or less ignored her.
A coworker of hers inquired about our yogurt making and she
began to explain. A few coworkers of mine asked the same line of questions.
There was definitely an interest in the actual process. I wrote a little more in-depth
post. This post seemed to go over much better so here we go again with the
bread this time.
100% Whole Wheat
Organic Bread
At the moment we are either using Whole Foods Brand (365)
Organic Whole Wheat Flour or Central
Milling Organic Whole Wheat Flour. When we run out we are going to start
buying it in bulk to further cut down on packaging. We Use Newman’s Own Olive Oil (but again we have
found a place where we can take the empty bottle and refill it. We use local
raw honey from Don Popp’s Honey Farm.
The Yeast is from Red Star, in a glass
container so we can reuse it. And the Gluten is Red Mill, but I think we can get that in
bulk as well. The Bread Machine is a Breadman
Ultimate that we borrowed from her mother.
1.
First we pour 1 and ¼ cups of water in the bead
machine.
2.
We add 2 tablespoons of olive oil.
3.
¼ cup of honey getting all of it in the machine
(Note: the inclusion of honey makes this bread non-vegan).
4.
3 cups of flour.
5.
1 tablespoon of gluten.
6.
1 ½ teaspoons of salt
7.
1 ½ teaspoons of yeast
We set the bread machine on whole wheat, light crust, for
1.5 lb. loaf and let it do its thing. It normally takes about 3 and a half
hours and in our case we have to check to make sure the machine is kneading the
bread (it doesn’t always sit in there right but the bread machine has seen many
miles in its life). And out comes delicious fresh bread.
Nutritional Value
The bread is usually pretty tall so you can slice it thin getting
upwards of twenty slices or cut ten thicker slices and then cut them in half:
The nutritional value changes with your set of ingredients
used and on how thick/thin you slice it.
Cost
I don’t have an exact layout on costs because I have long
ago recycled the receipts. But here is a run down of about what the above loaf
would have cost:
Vital wheat gluten 7¢
Flour $1.20
Yeast 50¢
Salt 2¢
Olive oil 48¢
Honey $2.32
Electricity 13¢
Total: $4.72
Cheap for an artisan bread but still a bit costly. At the
farmer’s market it costs me about $6.00 for a one pound loaf. Store bought
white bread is roughly $1/pound for white so that is much cheaper. Whole Wheat
non-organic usually runs about twice that and organic can range from really
cheap $2-3 dollars/pound to really expensive, bakery bread can run over $10!
Buying the flour in bulk we can get it much cheaper assuming we buy more. It
would lower the overall cost by about 20¢ per loaf. Also we were using
expensive honey but we like to keep it local so that is ok with us.
Storage
Homemade bread can go bad fast so once it is made what do
you do with it? We have two one-gallon Ziploc bags that we put it in and then
store it in the fridge. When one bag is empty we flip it inside out and make
sure all of the moisture gets out of it and then we use the other bag. Nothing
gets wasted and we compost the crumbs or let them get hard for making something
else.
Below is a picture timeline of how we do it. Feel free to
comment or try it for yourself and enjoy. If you don’t have a bread machine buy
a bread pan and look around online for a recipe. If you are looking at buying a
bread machine make sure you get a name brand model with a good rating and can
be repaired. You only want to buy one once.
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