Darcy's Whole Wheat Bread {The Recipe I Use Most}
Ingredients
- 15-17 cups wheat flour, about 80 ounces
- 2 tablespoons instant yeast
- ½ cup vital wheat gluten
- 1000 mg Vitamin C, crushed, or 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar
- 6 ½ cups very warm water
- ⅔ cup oil
- ⅔ cup honey or sugar
- 2 tablespoons salt
Instructions
- In a large bowl (or stand mixer, like the almighty Bosch), mix together 5 cups of wheat flour, yeast, vital wheat gluten and Vitamin C (or lemon juice or vinegar). Add the warm water and mix well. Add the oil and honey (or sugar) and mix again.
- Cover the bowl and let the mixture sit for 10 minutes. Add the salt and start the mixer (or mix by hand), adding the remaining flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl to form a soft dough. You may not need to add all of the flour! Judge the dough by feel not by the amount of flour you've used. It might be slightly sticky but should hold it's shape.
- Let the dough knead for 7 minutes in the stand mixer (or 15 minutes by hand). Form into 5 loaves (for the 8 1/2 X 4-inch loaf pans) and place into greased bread pans. Let rise until the bread is 2 inches above the top of the bread pan.
- Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes (I like to let the bread rise 1 inch above the top of the pans and then put the bread in a cold oven and turn the oven on to 350 degrees and bake the bread for 32 minutes).
Notes
Flour Amount: as with all yeast doughs, I never use the flour amount called for in the recipe as a hard fast rule (unless a weight measure is given and then I pull out my kitchen scale). Because humidity, temperature, altitude and a multitude of other factors can impact how much flour you need in your yeast doughs, I always judge when to quit adding flour by the texture and look and feel of the dough rather than how much flour I've added compared to the recipe.
Yeast: this tutorial on yeast may help identify how a perfectly floured dough should be.
Shaping the Dough: also, here's a later post I added with step-by-step instructions and pictures (and even a video at the end on shaping the dough into loaves) to get the perfect whole wheat bread.