First bread

My new grain mill arrived Monday afternoon and Tuesday I started my first batch of bread dough. The grain mill worked beautifully and I had fresh flour in no time at all. After reading all the benefits to using fresh groud flour I am so excited about this whole process. Have you seen what they take out of wheat to get to white flour!!! check out this article and you will see what I mean!http://www.nutritionlifestyles.com/homemill.htm

Sticky Dough!
I used a recipe in the BreadBeckers book (will post that later) As I was mixing it I thought for sure it was going to be a disaster. It just seemed so sticky and did not pull away from the sides of the bowl like I thought it was supposed to. The recipe called for 5 cups of fresh milled flour, I added that plus alot more. I lost track of how much unfortunately. Next time I will keep track. Anyways, I used up all the fresh flour and ended up adding some white flour. Then I was worried that the mixer would be overworked. I had read some reviews about KitchenAid mixers not doing well with bread dough, which is one of the reasons why I went with the Cuisinart. And so I did not know if that would happen to my new mixer and I did not want to kill it on the second time I used it. So I pulled out the sticky mess added some more flour and started kneading it by hand. I kept adding more flour until it wasn't too sticky anymore. I will have to make more to figure out what the problem is, my guess is the high humidity here or maybe just the grain???

Forgot to time the rising
Then I put it back in the bowl to let it rise to double - following the directions in the recipe. I was busy with kids and forgot to time how long I let it rise - oops! Then I took it out, cut into two and shaped it into the loaf pans, let it rise some more. Again I forgot to time it and put them into the oven when they seemed to rise double again. I think I got lucky and the dough seemed to do what it was supposed to. But in the future I must remember to time it so that I can compare.

Baking Bread
The loaves seem to bake just fine and we had pretty good bread with supper. My husband was like a little kid at Christmas!














But the bigger compliment was how much the kids liked it, especially Sam. This picture also shows the inside of the loaf. It was really moist and easy to butter.