Recipe : Whole wheat bread

Taking my baking experiments furthur, i decided to try the humble loaf bread. Simple, plain bread. I always suspected that bread available at stores had fair amount of refined flour though they also had whole wheat flour. Digging up the internet for many whole wheat bread recipes revealed the same thing. Then I thought of venturing all by myself, with a little help from the internet!
The starting point was our plain old chapati atta. The kind I get milled if I happen to be in Pune, or if I happen to buy readymade, i buy Aashirwad or pillsbury You can also use the multigrain atta.
So what i wished to try was the atta mixture we use for chapati, plus the yeast! And that is exactly what I tried!

A note on yeast. There are so many brands of yeast available, and different types too. So far with my limited baking, i have bought sachets of instant yeast. This is different from active dry yeast. I have put the procedure of the yeast I use. I suggest while adapting this recipe to your needs, read the instructions the yeast maker gives for proportions plus use your own judgement.

For the measurement, I prefer to go by the cup and spoon, and I have found that they are decently reliable. Many times I use the cup we typically get with the rice cooker. The spoon is the usual tea spoon.

The crumb of this whole wheat bread is coarse, as probably is expected of a non-refined flour. DO not expect this one to be ultra soft like the market bought one.



Ingredients

4 cup   Atta or whole wheat flour
4 teaspoon   Instant yeast
2 teaspoon    salt (or to taste)
8 teaspoon    oil (usual oil that we use for daily cooking)
 plus little extra for greasing
1 to 2 cups of luke warm water
3 teaspoon honey/sugar

Method

1. Mix the flour, salt and yeast  well. Add the honey/sugar and mix well. Form a well in the center of the flour mixture

2. Heat about 2 cup of water. The water should be only slightly warm. Add the oil and 1 cup water in the well formed inside the flour.

3. Mix well, and add the water as needed to form a ball of dough, the same consistency as chapati dough. The amount of water needed may vary according to the wheat flour.

4. Now comes the laborious part! Start kneading the dough slowly and with pressure of the base of your palm. You may use a greased surface or a floured surface as per your convenience. I generally apply oil either on my kitchen platform and knead on the kitchen platform or if the vessel is large, on the inside of the vessel, and knead in the vessel itself. At least 10-15 minutes of kneading is needed, and as one of the fool bloggers describes it -> till your shoulders fall! But.....if you have a food processor with a blade to knead dough, you can use that, and all is so smooth! If you have anything similiar to this or this, then your job is done! So you need to knead the dough till it looks smooth.

5. Then apply oil to the inside of a vessel in which you plan to keep it for rising. Place the ball of dough and cover with a plastic wrap or a kitchen towel. Keep the dough for about 60-90 min or till it doubles. The rising time depends on the climate. Here Jakarta, every place is a warm place throughout the year, unless you are in an AC room. In your city, you may want to search for a warm place and keep it to rise.

6. After it has risen for about an hour or more, punch air out and knead again for 10 min. This time around no need to use the food processor :) Arms are enough!.
7. Grease the bread pan, shape the dough to fit the bottom of the bread pan and cover with a plastic wrap/kitchen towel to rise again.

8. After about 30-40 min, start the oven and preheat to 220 deg centigrade. Preheat for about 10 min. Use top and bottom coils. In the meanwhile, the flour should have risen again

9. Remove the shrink wrap and prepare the dough to go into the oven. I generally make a small lin depression vertically in the center. If you so wish, you can add some sesame seeds, or any other topping of your choice...poppy seeds, oats, sunflower seeds etc.

10. According to a tip on a website, i added quarter cup of water in the bottom tray of the oven. Now this whole thing is ready to go inside the oven!
11. After 10 min of preheating at 220 deg, place the tray at the center of the oven and reduce the temperature to 190 deg centigrade. Bake for 40 min or till the upper crust is a nice golden brown colour, and a stick inserted comes out dry.

Note regarding ovens : According to the size and capacity of your oven, you may need to fine tune your baking time.

12. Turn off the oven, and let the bread pan stay in the oven for about 10 min. Remove the pan and keep on the cooling rack for about 10-15 min. 

 

13. Remove the bread from the pan and keep to cool on the cooling rack.

 

 

14. After the bread is cool enough, you can slice it and enjoy!