I have tried for years to make whole wheat bread from scratch, but my loaves usually wound up as hockey pucks or door stops. Although my house always smelled great, my family could never choke down the crumbs of my latest creation. That’s when I enrolled in a bread-making class. Guess what I found out?
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A good baker is a lot like a good scientist – they both make mistakes, but they also both know how to correct their problems through careful observation. I learned that my short, squatty, rock-hard loaves had a few issues I wasn’t aware of. By making small adjustments to my methods, I was able to make a mouth-watering, chewy, moist, airy loaf of whole wheat bread without spending all day in the kitchen. Oh.. and I didn’t even use a mixer! (But you can if you want to.) After asking the teacher about a million questions (she was very patient), I finally figured out what went wrong. Here’s what I learned in my baking class:

First, you have to start with good flour. The cheap stuff I bought had so low protein content that it never got to the elastic-stretchy stage bread needs in order to rise. I used a mix of red flour (14% protein, all whole wheat) and gold flour (12% protein, often called white whole wheat) when I made the good bread. If you use good flour, you don’t need to add gluten to it (which is really what the high protein content is already doing for you).

Make sure your flour is stone-ground. If it’s not, then the process of going from kernel-to-flour heated up the flour too much and killed most of the nutrients. Stone-ground flour ensures that the flour didn’t get too hot (due to friction) – did you know that it can get over 450 degrees when they process flour?

I have always been a bit of a fanatic about always making sure my foods have whole wheat when possible. I grew up thinking that white flour should be avoided at all costs. So you can imagine my surprise when my baking teacher said that whole wheat flour is mostly white flour! Turns out that the wheat kernel is mostly ‘white flour’, and when they grind the kernel into flour, millers sift out the ‘whole wheat’ part that has all the nutrients in it. To make the flour ‘whole wheat’, they just mix the nutrient-rich part back in.  But you’ve still got the white flour part, too.

For whole wheat bread, it’s best to make it in two mixing stages. The first stage (called the ‘sponge’) gives the flour, water, yeast, and honey time to develop together before adding the bulk of the flour and the rest of the ingredients.  By using the whole wheat flour (with the higher protein content) in this first stage, you give it extra time to soften up so it can develop the long gluten strands when you knead it later.

I also hadn’t kneaded it enough for long enough. I figured a few shoves and pushes here and there out to do the trick.  But yeasted breads aren’t anything like quick breaks like muffins and banana bread where you don’t want to mix too much.  Yeast breads, and especially the whole wheat breads, must have lots of motion and stretching to develop those elastic protein bands inside.

The other important thing I learned is that bread is supposed to be sticky. As in slightly less than stick-to-the-table sticky. I was adding too much flour and my loaf dried out way too much during the rising and baking stages.  I needed more water in my loaf to keep it moist until it was baked. It was also too difficult to add water to the dough once I started kneading it, so I learned to skimp a bit on the flour, since that’s a lot easier to add if I needed it.

So after only a few hours, I had a very nice pile of whole wheat dough that I soon made into cinnamon rolls, cranberry-walnut loaf, dinner rolls, and monkey bread. My kids were impressed. Here’s the dough recipe I used so you can try it out for yourself – and many thanks to my baking instructor!

Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

• 2 1/2 cups of warm water (100-105 ^oF)
• 2 tablespoons yeast (I used Saf instant)
• 3/4 cup honey at room temperature (did you know since honey is a natural preservative it never goes bad?)
• 2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (stone ground and high-protein content – I used Red Flour by Bob’s Red Mill or King Aurthur is great)

Mix these ingredients fully (your hand is your best tool) until all the lumps are gone.  You will probably smell the yeast coming to life right away, so don’t mix for more than a few minutes.  Cover it with a damp towel if it’s dry where you live, and stick it in an unheated oven with the light on for 1.5-2 hours. If it’s a warm day, use less time, but not less than 1 hour. You’ve just created the sponge.

Take the sponge out and place it on the counter. Preheat your oven (make sure there’s nothing in it!) to 350^oF and spray a loaf pan (or use parchment).

To your sponge, add:

• 1 tablespoon yeast
• 3 1/2 cups gold flour (stone ground, high-protein – I used Gold Flour, which is a white-whole-wheat version with 12% protein)
• 1 tablespoon salt (don’t skimp on this like I did, or your bread will rise too much and taste horrible)

Knead by hand (you can never over-knead by hand) until it’s soft and pliable, usually 6-10 minutes. If you’re using a mixer, make sure the dough hook actually cuts through and into the dough – the best hooks are heavy and corkscrew in design. The flat hook that comes with the standard kitchen-aid mixer will only push the dough around and not knead it at all. Be careful not to over-knead the dough in your mixer. (Getting the feel of the dough when it’s ready is something I learned to do in the class.)

Form it into your loaf pan (make sure it just touches the ends or it will mountain up on top). Let it rise for 20-40 minutes in a warm, draft-free spot. The bread is done with it reaches 180^oF inside (use a thermometer – all the bakers do). Turn it out of the pan right away to cool on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy.

Enjoy your bread! This bread will last a week on the counter. If you’re not going to eat it all before that, double-bag it and stick it in the freezer.

To make cinnamon rolls, simply combine butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar (use a 1:16 ratio for cinnamon and sugar) and sprinkle on a rolled out rectangle. Roll up, slice carefully without squashing it (use a bread knife and a sawing motion), and let rise and bake.

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