Friday, October 18, 2013

We Grew TWO Loaves of Bread!

On Saturday, October 12th we finally baked the bread that we started making on April 20th. It took us 176 days to make the field, plant the wheat, harvest it, thresh, winnow, mill it into flour, and then bake it into two loaves just in time for Canadian Thanksgiving!
Ready to make our Bread!
We chose a whole-wheat quick bread recipe from Jean Pare's "Company's Coming: Muffins & More" recipe book. The recipe is on page 110, and is called "WHOLE WHEAT BREAD". It was a simple recipe, and looked like it would work for us, so off we went!
Following Jean Pare's Instructions EXACTLY!
We carefully mixed our dry ingredients using all of our "shorts" and our flour. We kept the bran out of the bread, and we will put it in some cookies later. All of the flour and shorts together gave us about 7 cups of flour to work with, so we had enough for two loaves, plus a bit left over!
Almost ready to put the first loaf in the oven!
Mixing by hand was a bit tough, so we all took turns. Then we poured our batter/dough into a pan that we lined with parchment paper. The paper makes the loaf really easy to remove once it is baked.
We put the pan in the oven at 350 F for 40 minutes, and while it was baking we got our second loaf ready!
And just like that, LOAF ONE WAS DONE!!!
After we repeated the whole process one more time LOAF TWO WAS THROUGH!
All there was left to do was let it cool (a bit) and then finally try our bread, right from our own back yard! Well, the sugar, molasses, baking powder, baking soda, vinegar, milk and oil weren't from our yard, but the flour was! Thanks to all of those people that made all of those other ingredients too, whoever you are!
The bread tasted really good. It was sweet, not too heavy, and almost like a muffin. We will make this recipe again, even if we do NOT grow our own wheat to make the bread! The next morning we had some of our own bread toasted for breakfast.
Breakfast time!
For Thanksgiving, we went to Amma and Grandpa's house, which is about a two hour drive from our place. We took our bread along to be part of the Thanksgiving meal, and all of us enjoyed it. We have so much to be thankful for, and now we also know how thankful we can be for the bread that we buy in stores. Can you imagine if we all had to make our own bread?
From our own Back Yard to the Thanksgiving Table
Along the way we learned that you can grow two loaves of bread from a 4x8 field of wheat, so one loaf could be grown on a 4x4 plot, if the yield was good. Use a hard wheat. We did not fertilize or water our crop, so doing either will likely improve the yield. Milling is tricky. You could do it yourself, but getting help on a project is always ok too, and you might make some new friends (thanks again, Cigi!). One of the loaves has been eaten, and the other one frozen. We will eat it on special occasions between now and Christmas. Thank-you to all of you who have followed the blog!

And that is all we know so far.

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad you took the time to document and post your story. Thank you! What will you grow next?

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  2. Well, that was really enjoyable to read about. Thank you so much for doing this, and for documenting it so thoroughly. It sure sounds like a great learning experiment; as a former science teacher, it was nice to see how well you tracked both the actual data, and then discussed the significance of those data.

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