President’s Day White Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

I’ve been on a bread making kick lately huh? I made one good loaf and now all I want to do is keep making different recipes. This one I found while I was looking for pepperoni rolls (remember those from last week?) This bread recipe was very simple: yeast, water, salt, sugar, flour. Period. (oh, and sesame seeds, since I have them on hand)

I used white whole wheat because I thought it would be a nice transition for someone in this house (ahem Dennis) who refuses to eat wheat bread.

I adapted the recipe from here. 

One-loaf standard recipe

• 1 1/2 cups warm water (I always use a thermometer to be sure my water is between 105-110*F)
• 1 teaspoon yeast
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 3 1/2 cups flour (Again, I used white whole wheat)
• Sesame seeds (optional. I added these myself)

Preparation

1. In a large bowl, combine water, yeast, sugar, and salt. Let sit five minutes.
2. Stir in flour, a half cup at a time, and mix with a wooden spoon. When you get to the 2 cup mark, it will start to get tougher to mix, and although this can all be done by hand with your wooden spoon, I move the dough into my food processor.
3. Process the dough, adding the remaining 1.5 cups of flour slowly, until your dough forms a ball.
4. Take the dough out and knead on a floured surface for about 5 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic. (Or, if you’re like me, until you’re sick of kneading and you realize you got some help from the food processor.) Mine never comes out perfect and I always fear it won’t rise, but it will.  After a lot of research on bread making, a good rule of thumb is to knead until the dough can be pinched and the consistency is like an earlobe.
5. Place in a greased bowl (I use Pam) turning once to grease the whole roll. Cover with a towel and place in a warm spot until it doubles (about an hour.)
6. Take out the dough, punch down, roll out a few times on a floured surface and place in a greased bread pan (again, I use Pam.)
7. Place the towel back on the pan, let rise for another hour. Bake at 350* for 35 minutes.***
8. The original recipe says to bake for 25 minutes, but it was clearly not enough for me. It’s still very light and not as crispy as I would have hoped. You can always start out at 25 minutes and then check, but I should have trusted my instinct because I didn’t think 25 minutes would be enough.

 

The texture of this bread was more like a bagel, but I’m OK with that. Next time I will bake it for 35 minutes, and I can’t wait to try this with spelt flour, oat flour, and even regular AP flour to make the boyfriend happy. Overall, I like the ease of this recipe and when I mess with it a little more I’ll be able to properly grade it. Right now though, I still like my honey whole wheat recipe better.

Have you found a food that you can’t help but keep making over and over again until you perfect it?