The Lean Green Bean: It was a busy day of bread...

Hi Friends-

To continue my adventures in bread-baking today, I decided to also make a loaf of wheat bread in the bread machine. First of all, if you don't have a bread machine, GET ONE! But DON'T PAY FULL PRICE!! I got mine at a garage sale last summer for $5!!!! It had no instruction manual, but we googled the model number and found the entire instruction and recipe book online in pdf form. Seems like people are always trying to get rid of their bread machines, but I'm not sure why. Yes, they're heavy, big, kinda hard to clean....but all you have to do is throw 5 ingredients in the pan, press a button, go do something else for 4 hours and out pops an awesome loaf of bread! Doesn't get any better than that in my book. I don't use mine often, but I've done pizza dough, wheat bread, cinnamon raisin bread...

Don't get me wrong...it doesn't always turn out right. I got the itch to make bread last week and I tried to make a loaf of wheat bread. It was awful. Biggest mistake- I used all wheat flour which made it really dense and chewy. And it just plain sucked.

So I tried again today. The recipe I used had a combination of bread flour and wheat flour and used honey which added some sweetness.

Here you go:

Ingredients:
1 1/8 cups warm water at 110°F
3 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/3 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 1/2 cups bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Directions:

Add the ingredients to the pan in the order given. (It's important to keep your yeast and water separate until the baking cycle starts. It's also important to make sure your water is the right temperature so the yeast will activate properly!)

Choose the one pound loaf, wheat bread setting...hit start and go enjoy your free time! If you check-in after a couple hours, you might see something like this:

When the timer goes off....pop open the lid, pull out the loaf pan, and put the loaf on a cooling rack. This proved to be easier said than done for this loaf. It puffed up a little more than usual and kind of looked like a mushroom- but it still tasted good!

I had to use a knife to get the handle up to pull the pan out...It was a bit of a struggle, and the top got a bit mangled...but I prevailed over the bread- and it tasted good!