Bread Maker Recipe – Whole Wheat Bread

After some experimentation, and a return to the basics of just how flour and yeast work together, I've finally met one of my major food goals when it comes to bread making. I've come up with a satisfying 100% whole wheat recipe for the bread maker. It has a light crust and texture, and a gentle chew. The harsh tones normally found in whole wheat bread are greatly reduced.

I'm very excited about this. Now I can enjoy whole wheat bread – real whole wheat, not that stuff they call wheat bread in the grocery store – as daily bread.

We don't have to put up with mixing white flour with whole wheat flour for good results in the bread maker, anymore. We can increase our fiber intake and replace many of the simple carbs in our bread with more complex ones, and we don't have to give up fluffy texture or flavor.

Ingredients
1 cups plus 2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon vital wheat gluten
1 teaspoon dough conditioner
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Directions
Put the ingredients in the bread maker loaf pan in the order listed, or the order recommend by the manufacturer.* Use the whole wheat cycle, light crust.

When the cycle is complete, remove the bread from the pan and let it cool on a wire rack, covered by a kitchen towel, before slicing.

If you want a softer crust, try this secret trick. Once the bread has reached room temperature, place the loaf in a plastic bag and let it sit for an additional 30 minutes. This will ensure the remaining steam softens the crust.

Enjoy!

*In this recipe I actually violated the manufacturers suggestions. Sort of. In baking, sugar can be though of as a liquid, so I put the oil, salt and sugar in with the water, and then put the flour in, over the top. My feeling was that this would more evenly distribute the sugar and oil throughout the dough, before the yeast hit it and started working. I wasn't wrong. This simple step actually mad the difference between a passable loaf, and a tasty one.

Secret Breadmaker Ingredients

I love my breadmaker (a.k.a the bread machine, a.k.a. The Great White Wonder Cube!). It makes great bread, with less than half the work. The more I learn about it, the more I use it and the better results I get. The best part of using a breadmaker is you don't have to babysit it. With most recipes, you can set it up before you go to bed, set the timer, and enjoy fresh warm bread for breakfast.

There are a few things they don't tell you in the recipe book that comes with your bread machine, though. The moisture content in flour can vary, depending on age and environment. No matter how rigorously you follow the recipe, sometimes it's just not going to work out like you want it to. There are a few ingredients, we can add to the recipes to ensure that they turn out wonderfully every time.


Vital Wheat Gluten

Gluten is grain protein. Not all flours have the same protein content. Bread flour has a higher protein content than All-purpose flour, for example, while cake flour has less protein content. Bread flour can cost more, sometimes a lot more, than all-purpose flour and most bread maker recipes call for all purpose flour.

Instead of buying several different kinds of flour for every little thing you do, I buy all-purpose flour and then add wheat gluten when making bread to increase the protein content. It's not expensive and you need very little, about two teaspoons per loaf, so a single can of the stuff will last quite a long time.

When adding wheat gluten to a breadmaker recipe, I find I get the best results if I add it to the pan with the flour. The manufacturer of my bread machine recommends adding the water before the flour, so I add the wheat gluten right after I put in the flour, just to keep it away from the water. It just seems to work best for me this way.

If you have gluten allergies, you shouldn't be eating regular wheat bread in the first place. I'm hoping to experiment with gluten free breads in the bread maker, later on.


Dough Conditioner

Second to wheat gluten is commercial dough conditioner. Different conditioners contain different ingredients. Commonly, they are combination of wheat gluten, yeast and chemicals such as ascorbic acid (a form of vitamin C), ammonium chloride, DATEM (an emulsifier), different calcium salts and soy.

It's a common problem with bread makers that have vertical pans to have a lighter crumb at the top of the bread loaf and a denser crumb at the bottom. Dough conditioners help solve this problem by strengthening the texture and giving a more consistent rise, leading to a more consistent crumb.

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