Whole Wheat Bread

For longest time I have been wanting to bake a bread. By now I had bookmarked so many recipes that to pick one was difficult. Once I tried the very famous no-knead bread. But it did not work from me

Then I started to look for whole wheat version for making myself feel better.  It is not 100%  whole wheat but with picky eater on my hand I wanted to try something with combination of all purpose and whole wheat flour. And I found this recipe on one of my favorite web spaces theKitchn. I am not repeating the recipe here as I followed the recipe exactly but did goof up a little bit in end. While putting the loaf for baking I forgot (was watching the movie Vanilla Sky!) to drop the temperature from 425F to 375F as mentioned in the recipe. Also, my loaf did not rise as much in the second rise even though I kept in thee oven with lights on. But I am pretty satisfied with the results.

Bread came out nice. Unlike 100% whole wheat breads it was not very dense. Light and chewy to our liking. We devoured the hot sliced bread with generous serving of butter. Nothing like home made bread just out of the oven.  This recipe yields two loaves . I have only one loaf pan and I did not want to halve the recipe in first attempt I baked only one loaf and kept the other half in refrigerator. Will bake tomorrow, though not sure about the results after being in fridge for night.

A must try recipe. Personally for me baking this bread was so therapeutic. Moreover recipe does not need too many ingredient and I had everything in my pantry except the whole wheat flour and time. We usually use Atta to make chapati so I do not stock whole wheat flour of any other sort. For this bread I used king arthur whole wheat flour.

Loaf ready to be baked

Baking bread is little long process, knead the dough and wait for first rise and then second rise and then baking itself. With kids around I though I will multitask with other kitchen activities but then it did not work out and  I finally started with Saturday night dinner. After kneading the dough and putting it or first rise went to put kids to sleep. After kids were asleep started watching movie and then after about 11/2 hour made the loaf and kept it for second rise. And then finally baked. It was pretty late in night but all worth it. Me and  my husband snacked on it right when it came out of the oven.

Baked Loaf

I always had hard time picking from the wide array of breads available in stores. But after my toddler started eating bread we have been buying Pepperidge farm hearty White. Makes excellent sandwiches but it is white bread . Not so good. Want to move away from that. Which is your favorite?