More on Bread making

Wow, I sure did not expect so many people to be interested in my bread making! I'd like to get a little more in depth on it since it you all want to know more about it. First off, I leave me ground wheat in a food grade bucket in the kitchen plus keep some to work with in a small plastic container on the counter. I grind up a couple weeks worth of wheat at a time and have never had it go racid on me, even in the dead of summer. The majority of what's ground up for flour is the hearts or wheat germ. I sift off a great deal of the high fiber outer hull part of the wheat and feed the chickens with it. if I leave that part in my flour mix, I end up with a dense and much flatter bread. Plus, it's easier to get the family into eating it if it's a lighter, fluffier loaf. Whole wheat is great but it just doesn't rise up like the sifted flour does and sure doesn't rise even close to as nice.

If I had a higher quality of wheat at my disposal, I could probably leave more of the hulls in and still get the rise and fluffiness to the bread but I have more soft red wheat than I do hard white wheat.

The recipe is a super simple one, I got it from the Hillbilly Housewife site(listed on my sidebar) actually. It just works so well with home ground flour that it became my every day bread recipe. I actually use several different recipes here but the Hillbilly Housewife recipe is my quick, go-to recipe because it always comes out well, even in a rush.

I prefer the glass over metal pans. for some reason that I can not explain, it just seems to me that the bread rising and baking in the glass comes out better than it does in metal loaf pans. I actually scoured flea markets and garage sales to find those 2 glass pans. I also have a couple of glass round ones I use that I like very much. They are small round caserole dishes. Also, the glass dishes clean up much easier than metal pans do and I never have a sticking problem with the glass. See how beautifully the bread rises in the glass baking dish? I just don't seem to get results like that using metal.

I'm making cheese today and will make a post later this evening for the farms first cheese giveaway. More soon.......

Baking Some Bread

Here's a little bit of bread baking for you. These 2 loaves of bread have just been baked this evening. One of them is with "matured" flour, the other is some of the fresh flour I just ground and showed you in the previous post. Can you tell which one is the fresh? I got excited and pulled one loaf out a little bit too early to be a perfect match so I'm going to tell you which is which. The picture with the 2 whole loaves, the one in the back is the "matured" flour and in the picture of cut bread, the one on the right is the "matured" flour. As you can see in the picture, I cut the second loaf about 5 minutes of cook time too short but it is still a delightful loaf of bread. Just a little less crusty.