honey whole wheat bread

Bread baking has never been my specialty. I think I’m just scared of it. There are so many things that can go wrong and I hate having things go wrong!

But enough is enough and I’m learning how to make bread. Last night I attempted the bakery honey whole wheat bread–the standard 100% whole wheat bakery recipe. Successful? Moderately. It tasted really good. But the fact is I’m not sure it really made enough dough for two loaves–which I tried to make. I’m not convinced I let the second rise go on for long enough. AND I’m not sure I used enough yeast. I had no idea if the bakery recipes were written for cake or dry yeast. And either way I didn’t think I had enough.

So here it is: what I did and what it looked like. If you have any thoughts or input please feel free to help out. I could use it on this one.

Combine 2.5 cups water with 1.5 oz of yeast. I didn’t have cake yeast to experiment with–so I used active dry yeast. From what I could tell I needed 3 Tablespoons but I only had three packets–which probably ended up being just over 2 Tablespoons. Anyway, that’s what I used…

Once it had started to fizz I added 1/4 cup of honey and let it sit for a bit. Then stirred in 3.5 cups of flour. It looked lovely. Like this:

At this point I let the sponge sit for two hours. I covered it up and let it hang out in a warm spot on the radiator.

After two hours it had risen and looked like this:

Lovely no? At this point according to my recipe I was going to need to add about a pound of flour total, first just mixing it in, then kneading it until smooth. I think I used about 2 cups out of the 3.5 I expected to use. I also added 3T of oil and 1T of kosher salt.

I kneaded it until it felt smooth and elastic–but I have trouble knowing when it’s just right. When it looked like this I put it back into an oiled bowl to rise again:

After about an hour it had nearly doubled in size but I  was desperate to finish, probably a mistake, so I took it out, cut it in half, flattened it and rolled it up and put it in two oiled bread pans. I baked it at 375.

After about an hour it smelled delicious, if a little vinegary? Thoughts on that? And I thumped it on the bottom, declared it done, and took it out.

It definitely didn’t rise as much as I had hoped. But it was kinda short to begin with–again I’m not sure there was enough dough to make two loaves, or that I left it to rise long enough the second time, or that there was enough yeast. But in any case it tasted delicious. Especially with butter and honey straight out of the oven…

Luckily this bread was not too complicated to make, and can be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so I expect to go through it pretty quickly and will be trying again soon! The house smells like bread. I definitely like that.