Homemade Wheat Bread
Sometimes, my mother ground her own wheat and made homemade bread. I’ve squirreled away these yeasty Saturday afternoons into my memory forever: cozy, homey pleasures. We’d eat warm bread with butter and honey. We’d eat entire loaves in a day, sometimes. My sister Kapri does this now: grinding wheat, making bread. She brought me a loaf when I moved to my new place. And she’d just had a baby. I decided to give it a try — sans the wheatgrinder, the complicated ingredients, the baby. My sister is a more patient person than I.
This recipe is wonderful — half white, half whole wheat. It’s not as virtuous as some, but you won’t have to go searching for wheat bran or wheat gluten or varied other painful ingredients required with using wheat flour on its own.
Also, in the mix: my favorite honey, hauled home from Savannah, Georgia’s Savannah Bee Company.
The KitchenAid does all the work.
You need only King Arthur Wheat Flour and a lot of time (hence, Saturday afternoons — when you’re home, fussing around other things — or even, ahem, taking a nap).
Rising in the sun.
Now, after this you shape it into loaves, let it rise again, and bake it. And here’s what happened after that: we ate the whole loaf. In a day. Before I remembered to take pictures to show you. My friend Christina brought her baby, Noah, over, and he helped. He has happy bread memories, now — and I had that bread-baking smell in my house, and a plate of hot bread with honey, and that was enough.
If you must know, though, it looks basically like this: