The Ultimate Easy Fresh Ground Whole Wheat Bread Loaf | Bread of Life - In Just About An Hour

This recipe is my go-to recipe every time I want delicious bread, pizza, cinnamon rolls and more... made with fresh ground whole wheat flour... Bread of Life - it's a REAL thing!

This bread is such a great replacement for sandwich bread! It's just the right amount of chewy and holds up very well without crumbling! It's so soft, you'll think you're eating dead bread!

Most blogs start off with a bunch of information that, frankly, I don't usually read. If you'd like a few extra tips and trade secrets to bread baking, including links to tools that I highly recommend, read on after the recipe!

The Ultimate Easy Fresh Ground Whole Wheat Bread Loaf

Ingredients

• 1 cup very warm water

• ½ cup room temperature water

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter

• 2 tablespoons honey

• ½ tablespoon sea salt

• 3 ½ cups fresh ground whole wheat flour

• 1 tablespoon active dry yeast

• 2-4 tablespoons butter or olive oil for kneading & pan

Directions

1. DO NOT PREHEAT OVEN!

2. In a large plastic bowl, or your kitchen mixer bowl, place 1 cup very warm water, honey, butter and salt. Let stand for a few minutes while the butter melts and the salt & honey dissolve.

3. Grind your wheat. (2/3 cup of wheat berries is equal to 1 full cup of fresh ground flour.)

4. Add ½ cup room temperature water to the bowl.

5. Place the fresh ground flour on top of the water mixture. (It should float because of the fiber.)

6. Put the yeast on top of the flour in the center.

7. If mixing by hand, be sure to use a bread stirring utensil or a wooden spoon handle as this is a wet loaf. If mixing with a KitchenAid, use a dough hook attachment.

8. In a bowl by hand, mix until just incorporated, then let sit with a cover over the top of the bowl for about 5 minutes. Repeat every 5 minutes for 30 minutes, then proceed to step 7.

9. If using the KitchenAid mixer, on low setting, mix until just incorporated. Stop the mixer, scrape the sides of the bowl and mix on low for 5 minutes.

10. Let the dough sit for 5 minutes while you oil the bread pan.

11. Set dough on oiled, clean surface. Gently fold the dough onto itself, and form into a loaf. (I have a video here if you'd like to see what I'm describing!)

12. In the middle rack of your oven, let rise for 10-15 minutes, or until about double the size, Do not turn the oven on yet!

13. Once risen, turn on the oven to 350 degrees F and set the timer for 25 minutes. I find the easiest way to tell if it's done is to take an internal temperature after 25 minutes.

14. Bake until 190° internal temp is reached.

15. Remove from oven, Butter the top, and let cool in the pan, then use a butter knife to separate the bread from the sides, if necessary.

16. Remove from the pan and enjoy!

Life More Abundantly Eat Real Bread | Tees & More!

Tips

First, I want to encourage you that bread is an art, and though it may seem difficult it really isn't! Once you get used to making this bread, you'll be whipping it up in no time! You'll remember the ingredients, and it will become second nature! You'll also get a feel for what good bread dough should feel like!

So if you've never made bread before, please be sure to give this a try and be patient with yourself!

One of the benefits of this bread is how light and fluffy it is... and the key is a little secret that I learned from Healthy With Happy. (She has an excellent channel that I highly recommend!) She taught me that using flour to handle the bread makes it so dense that it has difficulty rising... and if you're not careful it can turn into a brick! (I know... because the first cinnamon rolls I ever made took hours and would have made excellent door stoppers!)

So the best way to handle the wet dough is by greasing your hands with either olive oil or butter. This will keep it from sticking, and will allow that dough to rise and have a wonderful crumb that replaces all sandwich bread that you can buy at the store.

Speaking of store bought bread... did you know that "There's Human Hair In Your Bread"?

Gross.

Yep... on the website vice we find out that,

"Amino acids are the building blocks of life, but they're not all created in the same way. L-cysteine, for example, is an amino acid used to extend shelf-life in things like commercial, factory-made bread, and it's most often synthesised from human hair (as well as duck feathers, cow horns and pig bristles). The hair—mostly gathered from the floors of hair salons in China, it seems—is dissolved in acid and, through chemical isolation, the L-cysteine is isolated, packed up and shipped off to commercial bread producers."

Double gross.

There's never been a better time to learn how to make your own food from scratch!

So... maybe you're wondering why I go the extra step of grinding my own wheat? Well, it's a story that took two years in the making for me, but I'll sum it up by saying this: Bread of Life is a real thing... and bread of death is every other kind of bread!

But don't take my word for it! Sue Becker at Bread Beckers is a food biologist, and she did all the research on what happened to our bread... and let me tell ya... it'll blow your mind!

I used her presentation and a few other videos to create the videomentary, "There's Something About This Bread". It's crazy how far we've come from what real Bread of Life is.

Here's a trailer for the video that gives a very small synopsis of why bread is so bad for us today:

Subscribe for more articles, recipes and information on grinding your own wheat, and eating your own food, from field to table. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to ask. Please forward to anyone you believe would be interested in trying this recipe.

Until next time, keep on providing life for your family, one meal at a time.

Angela Hope,

Bread of Life Bakery & Blog

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