Are you in search for a delicious, soft, healthy whole wheat bread recipe? We thought we would finally share with you our FAV! Bread made with fresh ground wheat. It is healthy, delicous, and helps you to use your Food Storage.

A couple years ago, we found this recipe and have never looked back! One time Julie told her husband’s best friend (who loves this bread) that she was going to try a different recipe. He got visibly upset, a little panicked, and said: “Don’t fix what ain’t broke!” The recipe she was wanting to try was actually just a variation of THIS recipe using a bunch of other grains… NOT another whole wheat recipe…don’t worry! This recipe comes from the Deals to Meals blog. Their blog is one of our favorite food storage recipe blogs.

A few things that are fantastic about this recipe:

• No need to double rise this bread!
• Few ingredients, without any dough enhancers made of artificial ingredients
• Doubles as pizza dough, and cinnamon roll dough
• Uses 100% freshly ground whole wheat, but still tastes light and fluffy
• The sponging process (explained below) makes the bread a great consistency
• Cooks up great in the Sun Oven if you are needing to cook without power

Emilie’s Whole Wheat Bread

(From Deals to Meals blog, directions are modified for Julie’s methods)

7 c. whole wheat flour (grind your own with your Wondermill)
2/3 c. vital wheat gluten (buy at Honeyville)
2 1/2 T. instant yeast (we like the SAF brand)

5 c. hot water (120-130 F)

2 T. salt
2/3 c. oil
2/3 c. honey or 1 c. sugar (we like honey the best!)
2 1/2 T. bottled lemon juice

5 c. whole wheat flour

Mix together the first three ingredients in your mixer with a dough hook (we both use and love our Bosch for this). Add water all at once and mix for 1 minute; cover and let rest for 10 minutes (this is called sponging). Add salt, oil, honey or sugar, and lemon juice and beat for 1 minute. Add last flour, 1 cup at a time, beating between each cup. Beat for about 6-10 minutes until dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. This makes very soft dough.

Spray counter with pam and take dough out of the bowl. Do NOT flour your counter, this will add dryness you don’t want in the bread. You basically want your dough to feel a “little” sticky. Separate dough into bread pans, and let rise until double in size. Bake at 350 for 22-30 mins or until browned. This depends on your oven, just watch it a little and cover with foil if it looks like it’s getting brown too fast. On the Deals to Meals blog, they do a quick rise with this bread, but I find that by the time I’ve cleaned up the kitchen and gotten all my ingredients put away, the bread is ready to go in the oven anyway.

This recipe will make 6 loaves of bread. I usually half the recipe, make 2 loaves of bread and one pizza dough for dinner that night. We have pizza once a week around here because it’s YUM and it kills 2 birds with one stone.

And here’s a picture of Julie making this very bread recipe using her Bosch (best appliance ever) for the New York Times, when they did an article about Mormons and Food (including Food Storage) back in January.

-Jodi Weiss Schroeder
http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net