Easy Peasy Bread
I’ve found the most success in weighing each ingredient in this recipe instead of measuring!
You can interchange the Whole Wheat Flour with Whole Wheat White Flour but don’t interchange it with All-Purpose Flour!
Ingredients:
Whole wheat flour 5 1/2 cups or 720 grams
All-purpose flour 2 cups or 270 grams
Yeast 1 1/2 Tbsp or 15 grams
Salt 1 Tbsp or 15 grams
Vital wheat gluten 1/4 cup or 25 grams
Lukewarm water 4 cups or 900 grams
Mix this all together in your food safe container until just evenly moistened. I use my hands at the end to get it fully mixed – be warned! It’s sticky! Don’t knead. Cover with the lid but not airtight and let it sit for 2 hours on the counter. It should rise and then begin to collapse. Then stick it in the fridge. Don’t seal the lid on tight!
When you want to make bread (which is easiest after it’s sat for at least 24 hours) pull your dough out of the fridge. Sprinkle it with flour and rub your hands with flour. Pull up a good handful of dough, about the size of a grapefruit. You can weigh it if you want; it should be about 1 pound. I don’t bother – I just eyeball it.
Gently stretch the surface of the dough underneath the loaf, turning a quarter turn after each stretch until you’ve done this all the way around. Form it into an oval shape and place on parchment paper on a wooden cutting board. This should take 20 to 40 seconds. No more!
Cover with plastic wrap and let sit 90 minutes.
At the 1 hour mark, put a baking stone on the middle rack and place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack in the oven and preheat to 450.
At the 90 minute mark, make 1/4″ deep slices in the top of the loaf, slide the dough AND parchment paper onto the baking stone. Pour 1 cup of water into the cookie sheet and shut the oven quickly. This will produce some steam to crisp the crust.
Bake 30 minutes. Take out and let cool on a cooling rack before slicing.
You can also put this dough into loaf pans to make sandwich bread.
This recipe makes 4 1 pound loaves!
(Taken from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois)
Ranch Dip
Getting my kids to eat veggies can sometimes be a challenge. We all love our Ranch though. What I don’t love is the ingredients in the store bought versions. So, I made my own.
1 16 ounce tub sour cream (Aldi brand Friendly Farms sour cream has NO other ingredients but soured cream)
1 1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1 1/2 tsp minced onion
2 tsp parsley
Dash pepper
Stir all the ingredients together. If you have time to refrigerate it for a couple hours, it tastes a little better, but if you don’t have that time just eat it! It’s great either way.
If you want a salad dressing, substitute half the sour cream for heavy whipping cream or the cream off the top of raw milk.
Desired Haven Farm 