30 Day Challenge

For Christmas 2008 I told my husband I wanted a bread machine. I was going to make all kinds of nice healthy breads for my daughter who was about to start eating breads. I was going to be the BEST mother EVER. I picked out this beautiful Black and Decker stainless steal horizontal loaf machine so it would look hot on my counter AND make proper looking bread!

I made 2 loaves.

One rose so much it imploded. The other was so airy it felt like you were eating soap suds.

My daughter ate store bought bread.

Sometime in late 2009 I ate some bread machine bread at a friends house and it was like bread, real bread, not dollar store sponge consistency. So I asked for the recipe. Yup, it was out of the same Black and Decker owners manual I had BUT it was the quick rise or rapid setting (whatever it's called). I never thought of using the rapid setting before, I figured the bread would be nasty and taste very "yeasty." And maybe because I felt like using a bread machine was already cheating, I couldn't bring myself to also use the rapid cycle. So I tried it. And it was great! A year later we had edible bread out of the machine!

But that was for white bread. I wanted whole wheat bread. So I looked online, googled "whole wheat bread machine rapid cycle recipe" in as many forms as I could and couldn't find a single recipe for the dang rapid cycle. All that came up was "rapid yeast" for bread machines. Well dur, thanks I caught that in the manual. So I figured I could just try a regular whole wheat recipe and use the rapid cycle. Everything inside me cringed at this idea because I was sure if the recipe wasn't tailored to a "rapid cycle" it would implode again or make a rock or something horrible. I am a totally logical thinker. So I searched for recipes. Every whole wheat recipe had tons of "junk" in it: honey, molasses, gluten... For real? But I tried a recipe, and guess what? It tasted like molasses. SO not what I wanted. So I googled recipes, with words like "simple, easy, quick" anything that might take out the nasty molasses. Finally I found one "water, milk, flour, margarine, sugar, salt, yeast" YES! I have all those! And I tried it, and it was great!

So in January I decided I would try and make all our bread for one month. To be honest, this sounds a lot more noble that it really was. The truth is, we had no bread and I had 2 BIG bags of flour in the cupboard, so it started out as just making bread to have bread and turned into "why not try it for a month?" I am slowly getting better at cutting the bread into slices, although some still come out of the toaster in a very cool "s" shape. But it's interesting noticing some of the differences in homemade bread, other than my house smells AMAZING a few times a week. Obviously it spoils faster than commercial bread. But everything spreads differently on homemade bread. You can scrape butter, or whatever, across commercial bread, but homemade bread kinda "sucks it up".... Even just that, in itself, lets me know we are getting a few less chemicals in our daily diet. Don't worry, I'm not going there, I just like knowing it's a small "good thing" I am doing for my family. But who knows, in a few years they will probably come out with some big study that bread machines leak some kind of toxic cancer causing make your fingers fall off chemical into your bread... But for now it's good.



Here's my super simple "75%" whole wheat bread recipe.... (sorry I forgot where it is from)

for one pound loaf

1 tsp yeast
1.5 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white flour
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp margerine
1/4 c milk and add water until 210ml or just under 1 cup