Whole Wheat Bread

Whole-Wheat Bread * how to proof yeast * how to knead bread dough

2 packages (or cakes) yeast

½ c. warm water

1/3 c. honey

3 c. whole-wheat flour

1 Tbsp salt

1/4 c. shortening

1 2/3 c. warm water

3 1/2 to 4 c. bread flour or all-purpose flour

Dissolve the yeast in the 1/2 c. warm water and add honey. Mix, then set aside to proof (about 5 minutes).

In a very large bowl, mix whole-wheat flour and salt. Add shortening and 1 2/3 c. warm water and mix well with a fork. Add yeast mixture and mix well again. Add three cups of bread flour (or all-purpose flour) and mix first with the fork, then with your hands.

Flour working surface well and knead for a full ten minutes, adding more flour as needed (up to another cup). Grease a very large bowl and turn the dough until greased on all sides. Cover with a towel and let rise in a warm spot until about doubled in size. Punch down dough, then divide and shape by hand into two loaves. Place in greased loaf pans, cover with a towel, and allow to rise another hour or so. When dough has doubled in size again, place in 350 degree oven for 40 minutes.

Turn out on racks and rub tops with butter. Allow to cool for at least ten minutes before cutting. Makes two loaves.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make whole-wheat bread.

I’ve been planning this episode for a long time, because everyone should know how to make bread from scratch. It’s not hard, but it does take a lot of time because the dough has to rise twice. This will also be the final episode of Real Life Cooking. The old episodes will remain for you to listen to, though.

This recipe is my mother’s, and as you may remember, she wasn’t actually a great cook. But she could make bread and it was always amazing. I’d like to say this is a family recipe passed down for generations, but she actually got it off the back of a flour bag when I was a kid.

You’ll need two kinds of flour for this recipe, whole wheat flour, preferably stone-ground because it’s coarser and more robust, and either bread flour or all-purpose flour. You’re also going to need a lot of both, so make sure you have plenty. If you bought whole wheat flour during lockdown, thinking you were going to make bread, it’s probably pretty stale by now so I recommend you buy fresh. Just, you know, an observation, no real reason. Also, check the date on your yeast. You need ordinary yeast for this recipe, not quick-rise. You’ll also need a really big mixing bowl and two large loaf pans.

First, clean your working surface and give it a good scrub. Then get out your very biggest mixing bowl, the one you sometimes wonder why you own because it takes up so much space. Give it a wipe to make sure it’s clean if you haven’t used it for a while. You only need one giant mixing bowl even though if you read the recipe, it sounds like you need two. We’ll go over that in a minute.

Get out a small bowl too. A cereal bowl will do. Measure half a cup of warm water into the bowl. The water shouldn’t be anywhere near boiling but it also needs to be more than just lukewarm. Then add the yeast to the water and stir it in until it dissolves, more or less. It’s easiest to do this with a whisk if you have one, but a fork or even a spoon will do. Don’t worry if you can’t get it to dissolve all the way. Add the honey to the mixture and stir it in until it’s dissolved, then set the bowl aside.

This process of adding warm water and honey or sugar to yeast and letting it sit for five or ten minutes is called proofing. Sometimes a recipe will just direct you to proof your yeast, without any further instructions or amounts, or it might say to proof one package of yeast in X amount of water. Even if a recipe doesn’t say so, you have to add some form of su