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I started baking bread again last spring. As a teenager, I baked bread just about every week. This was before the food revolution of the 90’s, so nothing besides sliced processed bread was available in our Vermont supermarket (although you could get this pretty good bagged brand… I still occasionally buy the Sprouted Wheat for a childhood flashback in the bizarre event that I happen be in Whole Foods and needing bread at the same time. Since I try not to be in Whole Foods, ever, this is rare indeed). Lest you think I was some sort of baking wunderkind, let me set the record straight. We did our own bread baking simply as a matter of course.  My mom had made bread when I was a small child; we knew what the real thing tasted like and were just not able to eat the processed stuff. Since I’d grown up with it, making bread didn’t seem like such a big deal, and I liked being in the kitchen.

I still find it amazing that many otherwise accomplished cooks find the idea of making bread intimidating. I’m not sure why, since bread baking doesn’t require much skill, but these days there seems to be an aura of mystery around it. An old boyfriend of mine, having once seen me kneading bread at the kitchen counter, had some powerful image of me as a sort of earth-mother domestic goddess. (Presumably in the fantasy version there is golden light streaming in the windows and some angelic music playing.) I always found this funny, since making bread was never such a romantic pursuit for me. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but it was a purely practical thing. I didn’t even vary my recipe much once I had one that worked reasonably well; I made a straightforward sandwich loaf, half whole wheat and half white flour, kneaded by hand.

Then I left for college and years abroad, and started living in cities (Boston, then New York). I lost the baking habit for various reasons, and even once I settled down to a more domestic life didn’t start again. My first husband was French, for one – and baking (especially bread baking, but also most pastry production) is not a home pursuit in  French culture. For years, I became your average complacent bread-buying consumer. What first pushed me to finally think about baking again was when, at some point last year, my favorite New York sandwich and toast bread went up to a whopping $5.69 at Fairway (and, egads, I see from searching for this link that it is now $7?! How can that be?!). Basically, I looked at that $5.69 price tag and thought ‘enough! I know how to make this stuff myself!’

That, of course, and I got a Kitchenaid. My (now) husband and I were making a gift registry for our upcoming wedding early last year, and puzzling over what to put on it. This being a second wedding for me, and both of us being well past 30 so fully equipped in the household goods department, we didn’t have much to ask for.  The Kitchenaid was really the only kitchen gadget I didn’t already have (at least that I wanted), and, besides, the Cuisinart and hand mixer weren’t really cutting it for the double batches of Christmas cookies I put out every year. So on it went. I didn’t think anyone would really buy it for us, but before I knew it, my wonderfully generous stepmother (an amazing cook and baker) was all over the Kitchenaid. I think she had it snatched up and on its way to me before the virtual ink on the html code had dried.

Thus began anew my bread baking (far be it from me to not make use of a fabulous new kitchen gadget). And ever since, I have been telling anyone who will listen that the secret to great home-baked bread begins and ends with the Kitchenaid.  Kneading by hand may be great for inducing earth-mother fantasies, but the only way to make really great bread at home, especially if you are making whole wheat bread, is to let the machine do the work.  This is not just because you can’t knead by hand long enough to develop the gluten in the dough (you can, and it isn’t really all that much work). But the fact of the matter is that in order to make a dough that you can manageably hand knead, you need to add quite a bit more flour. A dough that is dry will not be able to stretch as easily, will not rise nearly as much, and will turn out a little on the heavy and dry side. Anyone who survived their parents’ 1970’s health food kick can attest to this.

The idea of using a more slack dough is a big part of Jim Lahey’s whole baking theory. The point in his “No-Knead” bread recipe is not to save you the odious labor of kneading bread, but rather to make a much wetter dough that does a long rise and so can develop gluten through rising, rather than kneading. (I tried his recipe, by the way, and have never had it turn out terribly well – it was always too flat. Some people swear by it, but it just didn’t do it for me. Plus, I like making pan loaves for sandwiches. We have these square plastic containers to take sandwiches to work in and the pan loaf bread fits better. Trying to make a sandwich from a round thin loaf fit into a square container is just too hard for me at 7:30 in the morning.)

Anyhow, my first try with making a 100% whole wheat loaf using the Kitchenaid last spring was a revelation. I was able to clean up the few bread-making dishes while the thing was doing the kneading… AND there was no flour glued to the counter with bread dough to clean up afterwards.  Better still, I was able to get a much looser dough kneaded effectively. The result was a gorgeously towering, domed loaf – a far cry from the heavy 100%  whole wheat loaves I’d attempted once or twice before. While I still haven’t experimented widely with bread recipes (old habits die hard), I have since tinkered with my original success and refined the recipe to get something that I am consistently happy with.

And recently, thanks in large part to Dorie Greenspan, I have been doing more ‘playing around’ (her words and advice in my new favorite Baking, From my Home to Yours) with baking recipes in general. My baking hiatus was partly caused by the fact that I bought the “baking is playing by the rules; cooking is being creative” stereotype. “Playing around” is something you are traditionally taught is a baking no-no. In fact, if you know what you are doing, it is easy to do (although you don’t get to see the results until the end. But baking disasters are, fortunately, almost always still edible). One of the most important things I have learned to do with bread baking is to be flexible and attentive to the look of the dough while mixing and kneading in the Kitchenaid. I’ll add a little more or less flour, or a tad more liquid – whatever is needed to make the dough the right consistency. And the right consistency is definitely a little more gooey than I was used to with hand-kneading.

So, if your Kitchenaid is just gathering dust in your kitchen, I say get it out right now, find the dough hook, and try making some bread. If you become a convert, and I hope you will, you may never have to spend $7 on bread again.  (Start with this recipe, and I will follow up with a few more “Kitchenaid needed” recipes in the next week or so.)

Meg’s Never-Fail, Not-$7 100% Whole Wheat Health Loaf

Adapted from The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion

• ¼ cup pumpkin or sesame seeds
• ¼ cup walnuts (or use ½ cup of any one of these)
• Spin to coarsely chop in a food processor and put in the bowl of the Kitchenaid (or any stand mixer, I’m not pimping the brand here!).
• ¼  cup warm water
• 1 TBSP sugar (brown or white, or mild honey)
• 1 ½ tsp active dry yeast
• Mix these together and set aside for a few minutes to proof the yeast while you measure and mix the rest; if it foams up you’re good to go. If not, your yeast is bad. Don’t waste the rest of the ingredients by using it! Get new yeast and try again. This has only happened to me once, when I bought yeast at (you guessed it) the Hated Whole Foods.
• ¼ cup whole or ground flax seed (ground is more “bio-available” but it spoils fast. You need to keep ground flax seed in the freezer and the bread will not keep as well)
• 3 ½ cups (18 3/8 oz) whole wheat or white whole wheat flour (I prefer to measure by weight, not by volume – it’s nearly impossible to measure flour accurately by volume).
• 1 ½-2 tsp salt (to your taste, but I usually prefer a little more than 1 ½)
• Add to the chopped nuts in the mixer bowl and stir to combine
• 1 ¼  cups cool-to-warm water (I use warm because I keep my whole wheat flour in the fridge or freezer, which you should do, too, to keep it from getting rancid)
• 2 TBSP Molasses
• 3 TBSP Olive or Grape Seed oil
• Mix these in a large measuring cup, then add the foamy proofed yeast. Stir it all up and add to the mixer bowl.
• Process on low (using the dough hook) until combined, stopping and scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary to get all the flour involved.  It should be a slightly shaggy, fairly wet sticky dough. If it seems dry (and if you measure your flour by volume it may well be. Flour also will be able to absorb more or less water depending on the humidity and atmospheric pressure) add a little more water, a few drops at a time, until you get a more shaggy dough.
• Turn off the mixer and let it sit for 20 minutes so the flour can absorb some of the liquid (this is another important step for success with making whole wheat bread that is not as heavy as a brick). Then knead with the dough hook on medium for about 10 minutes. If the dough still seems very wet after 5 minutes, you can add a tad more flour. But don’t add too much: it should still be a pretty wet dough (it will remain sticky at the end).
• Transfer to a greased bowl, cover with a damp kitchen towel, and let rise at warm room temperature for about an hour (a little more won’t hurt it).
• Punch down, shape dough into a log, and plop into a greased standard loaf pan (8 ½ x 4 ½). Cover again (with the towel or greased plastic wrap) and let rise in a warm place for about an hour (more or less) until it has risen up about 2 inches above the rim of the pan.
• Preheat the oven to 350 during the last few minutes of rising. Bake the bread for about 45 minutes (if it seems to be getting too dark, you can tent with foil for the last few minutes; I have not had to do this).
• take out of the oven, turn it out of the pan (this is important to do so your bread won’t steam in the pan as it cools) and cool completely on a rack before slicing. I know the smell of warm bread is hard to resist, but if you cut into a warm loaf it will stale much more quickly. Resist the temptation to slice before it’s cool if you plan to use the loaf for more than one day!  Wrap the bread tightly when it is completely cool; one of the salient features of this bread (besides its tastiness and great moist texture) is that it will keep well for up to a week.