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Whole Wheat Bread Machine Bread, in words and pictures 25 September 2009 9:27 am

Posted by Tracy in : baking,bread,food snobbery,kitchen gear,pictures,recipes,vegan,vegetarian , trackback

This Foto Friday I would like to present you with the bread machine recipe I have been using most frequently this summer. It’s adapted from a recipe that came with our current bread machine, the Breadman Ultimate I learned to stop worrying and love, pictured here with the bread ingredients, on our kitchen counter:

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A bit crowded on the counter, yes.

The recipe is for the Breadman Ultimate’s whole wheat cycle, the 1 1/2 pound size, with the crust color of your choice (options are Light, Medium, and Dark, defaulting to Medium, which is what I generally use). The bread machine’s instruction manual and recipe book helpfully notes that the Whole Wheat bake cycle runs at 336 degrees F, and even includes a big table that breaks down what the machine does at every step of the cycle (see below). Sometimes I think it might be interesting to try to replicate its actions with, say, the stand mixer, but then I think that sort of defeats the whole lazy-wonderful point of having a bread machine in the first place. Anyway.

Ingredients

Instructions

Set up and plug in the bread machine. DO NOT FORGET THE DOUGH PADDLE. THIS IS CRUCIAL. Measure all the ingredients into the baking pan. It will look more or less like this:

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Does that look like it will turn into bread? It looks like it could turn into a big, glutinous mess…

If you’re planning to use the bread machine’s timer setting, it’s good to be a little cautious measuring your ingredients, to make sure that the yeast doesn’t get wet too soon. Set the machine to the whole wheat cycle, loaf size 1.5 pounds. (If you want the bread to be done in more than ~3.5 hours, adjust timing accordingly.) Press Start. Come back for delicious bread in 3.5 or more hours, depending on what you programmed into the machine. Here are the cycle times, for anybody who ever wants to try this by hand, or with a different bread machine (you can usually program in custom cycles).

PreHeat Knead 1 Knead 2 Rise 1 Punch
30 min 3 min 17 min 50 min 10 sec
Rise 2 Shape Rise 3

Bake

TOTAL
24 m 50 s 10 sec 44 m 50 s 42 min 3h 32m

Ok, I’m feeling very nerdy now.

When the bread is done, unplug the machine. I find it’s easiest to get the bread out of the pan if you let it cool in there for 5-10 minutes, but that it gets kinda unpleasantly soggy if allowed to cool in the pan all the way to room temperature.

Notes

The original instruction manual bread recipe called for sweetening the dough with molasses, but when I tried that with blackstrap, it really dominated the flavor of the bread in a way I found really unpleasant. Stroop and honey are both mellower and/or more neutral-tasting (I got the idea for trying stroop from the recipe for Swedish limpa bread on the back of the bottle I got at IKEA).

Here’s a picture of the dough after the pre-heat and first knead cycles:

Rising after preheat and first knead cycle.
Like I said in the Flickr caption, that totally looks like dough.

Note that you could pull the dough out of the bread machine at this point and shape it and rise it and knead it and bake it to your own satisfaction — in fact, many bread machines have a cycle designed just for making dough, so you can do exactly that.

Finally, here is a picture of an earlier loaf of this bread, in lieu of the finished product of this post’s other pictures, because I got tired of waiting for the bread to be done and went for a bike ride — and the machine just finished the bread for me, no problem. Yay!

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It’s not artisanal-fancy, but it’s way better than most of the bread-like stuff in plastic bags at the grocery store. Cheaper and easier, too.