Home is where the fresh-baked bread is!

A European survey says that freshly-baked bread is the number one most popular fragrance for men and women.  I must agree.  To me nothing, and I mean NOTHING, beats the aroma of freshly baked bread.  Maybe it's because it brings back memories of my mother baking bread while my sister and I hovered nearby waiting for pieces of dough to eat.  But when I walk into the kitchen, the heady aroma of fresh baked bread embraces me and fills me with a warm, homey satisfaction.   This is one of the reasons I started making my own bread.

Ever since my first pregnancy, I really started paying attention to health and diet.  As the years have gone by, I have become increasingly careful about eating organic and natural food, and so seeking a good bread recipe naturally fell into place.  I always bought 100% whole wheat bread at the grocery store, but it never compared to my mom's bread.  I found it too light, too sweet, and lacking something that I couldn't quite place.  I tried some 100% whole wheat bread recipes, only to fail miserably.  My bread wouldn't rise.  I learned that store-bought bread added wheat gluten, among other things, which is what causes white flour to rise so nicely.  Whole grain flours have much less gluten in them, and so it is necessary to add gluten back to the flour to make it rise.  Only once did I have success, and although I tried many times to repeat it, I failed.  My husband thought I was wasting time (and organic flour) by adding the gluten back.  "Why not just make bread that has some white flour in it? You know you are basically creating white flour again by adding all that gluten." I gave up on the 100% whole wheat flour recipe.

Even though my mom's recipe was only ever half whole wheat flour and half white, it was always thicker, heavier, and more nutritious FEELING than the store-bought bread.  I eventually found a recipe from an old friend who made her own bread.  I altered it to my own liking, and I now make 8 or 9 loaves of bread once every week or two.  It's time consuming, it's not hard, and it's very VERY rewarding. 

My husband, the number cruncher in our family, has it figured out that, even including my organic flour and other ingredients such as hemp hearts and organic molasses, and even including the time I spend making it, my loaves work out to cost us $1.33 per loaf.  That certainly impressed us and our food budget!  Compared to spending $5+ a loaf at the store, we have it made.  We also know exactly what is going into the bread, and best of all, our home smells like freshly-baked bread 3 or 4 times a month!  

You can find the recipe for this multi grain bread here. I make it using (put organic in front of most of these ingredients) whole wheat flour, multi grain flour, unbleached white flour, sesame seeds, hemp hearts, ground flax, lemon juice, molasses,demerarra sugar, olive oil, milk powder, fresh eggs, yeast and salt.  I spend about an hour preparing the bread to the point of its first rise, up to the elbows in flour and dough, with children at my elbows begging me for more dough.  Making bread from scratch is a part of home now, for my kids, just as it was for me.  And I hope that they will lovingly remember the aroma of fresh-baked bread and home in the years to come.