Thursday night I ground the hard red wheat for the Whole Wheat 5 Grain Bread. Yesterday I ground the hard white and rye, dumped everything in the mixer but . . wait . . where was my vital wheat gluten? I almost always use that, along with lecithin when making bread from home milled flour. I searched . . for maybe an hour . . with the flour sitting in the water. I didn’t want to mix everything without the gluten and lecithin in there. I honestly went through every cabinet and every drawer in my kitchen. I knew exactly what the bags looked like. I looked in the sun room cabinets even though I was sure I hadn’t put them in there because of the heat. I looked in the laundry room pantry but didn’t think they would be in there. I even went digging through Vince’s junk room, just in case he accidentally put them in with some of the stuff he brought home from the pallet store because a lot of the food items he buys kinda look like the bags the gluten was in. No . . couldn’t find them anywhere.
I decided to just make the bread without those things (the recipe doesn’t call for lecithin) and I remembered . . downstairs. The last time I made whole wheat bread, I made it downstairs. Yep, that’s where they were.
Got the dough all mixed up. I had steak out for dinner. After the first rise and more pulls, Vince came in and said he wanted to go eat Mexican. “We can save the steaks for tomorrow.” I said . . so long as I’m home within an hour to knead the bread dough! Of course, we weren’t home within an hour and then we got home and I had several things we needed to do outside, then some things we had ordered from Amazon said “Delivered. Handed to person.” Nope . . we weren’t even home and the cameras didn’t show that Amazon had been here so I had to deal with that. The delivery person was supposed to take a picture and they always do but . . they didn’t so Amazon re-sent the merchandise.
Then . . back to the bread but by the time it was time to bake the bread, I was outside working in the garden with the timer set on my phone so I had to run back in, run upstairs, take the cover off the bread, go back out and work, run back in when the timer went off again.
The rolls were supposed to be for dinner but since we didn’t eat dinner at home, we split a roll to try it since this was the first time I had made this recipe. The bread is good. The bread isn’t as tall as I had liked but the recipe is supposed to make two loaves and by the time I took the dough out for the three rolls, which are pretty big, that accounts for the shortness of the loaves. Vince said he liked it and so far, it’s the best seeded bread I’ve made.
Next time, I’ll use the Bosch mixer, which is downstairs. This was a bit much for the Kitchen Aid and the Bosch does so much better with these heavy batches of dough. I did it all upstairs because I had other things going on (making Cowboy Candy from some of the jalapenos in the garden). You can see that I made three pints and had two pints and a half pint of leftover “juice”. I love to brush that on chicken breasts while they’re grilling – a little sweet, a little spicy!
I do recommend this recipe for anyone wanting a seedy bread with whole wheat flour.