Monday, February 22, 2010

Honey Wheat Bread

 

From the blog history, I noted that we have stopped baking bread for the month of February. Probably we were too caught up with preparing food for CNY and Valentine’s Day. Guess it’s time to get back to our weekly bread baking in addition to other baking. We have just gotten ourselves a food processor that comes with a dough blade few days ago. In addition, we also bought another large loaf pan ( 9 1/4 x 5 1/4 x 2 3/4) with bonus recipe on honey wheat bread. The recipe looks good and easy to do. I decided to give it a try using the new food processor and the new loaf pan. Despite the food processor came with a plastic dough blade, we decided to use the normal stainless steel blade that came with the processor. From our online search, we found out that there are many complaints on the plastic dough blade. Anyhow, the dough came off well with the normal blade. Making bread is more simpler now with a kitchen helper :-).Honey Wheat Bread

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour, divided
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 2 cups whole wheat bread flour

Steps:

  1. Combine 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour, salt and yeast in a large mixing bowl.
  2. Heat milk, honey, water and oil until hot to touch (125 degrees F).
  3. Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and beat for 2 minutes using medium speed. Scraping bowl occasionally.
  4. Add 1/2 cup all purpose flour and beat at high speed for 2 minutes. Scraping bowl occasionally.
  5. Stir in whole wheat flour and enough additional all purpose flour into processor until dough is stiff. Beat at medium speed and scraping bowl occasionally.
  6. Knead on lightly floured surface until smooth and elastic for about 4-6 minutes.
  7. On another large bowl, grease the bowl with a small amount of oil. Place the dough in the bowl and flip the dough to cover the dough with oil.
  8. Cover the bowl with a plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise for 10 minutes.
  9. After 10 minutes, remove the dough from the bowl and place on a lightly floured surface. Punch down in the dough to release the air from the bread and knead out bubbles for 5 minutes.
  10. Shape the dough into a 8 inches log and place seamed side down into a lightly grease loaf pan.
  11. Cover the loaf pan with plastic wrap and let it rise for another 30 minutes.
  12. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F and place the loaf pan in center of oven for 35 minutes.
  13. You can test if the bread is done by thumping the bottom of the bread and it should sound hollow.
  14. Let the bread cool on a wire rack for 10-15 minutes before slicing it

The recipe is good and the bread turns out well. It’s crusty in the outside and soft in the inside – a perfect loaf for sandwich bread or toast bread. I like this recipe for it’s short proofing time yet yields a good result. A loaf of bread like this provides us with about 13 –14 slices of bread which come up to 3 meals. Probably I should bake 2 loaves in the future to save time and minimize the washing. The bread can last for 4-5 days.

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