My Very Own 100% Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

Well, what does one do with a 25 pound bag of wheat?  A family staple at our house is homemade bread.  Seldom do I buy bread from the grocery store.  This recipe has just enough sweetness to entice my kids to like it, and oodles of whole grain nutrition.

I keep the wheat I use regularly in a 5 gallon bucket.  This is my bucket of hard white wheat.  I also use hard red wheat - just depends on the mood I'm in :)

I load about 6 cups of wheat berries into my NutriMill grinder and grind it on high. The FINE - COARSER dial I set so that the arrow is below the "N" in "FINE."

And I get this wonderful whole wheat flour.  It has a much richer flavor when you grind it fresh, and is undoubtedly more nutritious, but I don't tell my kids that!!

Then I use it to make bread, rolls, cookies, pancakes - pretty much any recipe that uses flour.  Here is my 100% Whole Wheat Bread recipe.


Heidi's Hearty 100% Whole Wheat

3 1/4 cup warm water
1/4 cup sugar
2 Tbs molasses
2 Tbs honey
1 1/2  Tbs yeast
3 Tbs butter, cut up
2 tsp salt
6 cups whole wheat flour
3 Tbs dry milk powder
3 Tbs gluten
1 Tbs dough enhancer (optional, but it gives the bread great texture)


Place the warm water, sugar, honey, molasses, salt, yeast and butter in a large bowl.  Stir.  Add 2 cups of the flour, dry milk, gluten, and the dough enhancer.  Stir and let sit 5 minutes.  Stir in remaining flour to form a soft dough.  Turn out on floured surface and knead for 5 minutes.  Set in greased bowl, cover and let rise 1 - 2 hours or until double in bulk.  Punch down and form into bread or rolls.  Let rise again.   Bake at 350° for 35 minutes for bread, and 25 minutes for rolls.

Makes 2 large loaves.

What Do You Know About Wheat?

I came across this very informative website this morning published by the Wheat Foods Council.  Super informative, and what I really enjoyed was reading over some of the recipes and watching their "How Wheat Works - Harvest Videos"

I will share one of them here for your enjoyment, but be sure and check this site out!

Dehydrated Bananas

I found bananas on sale this week for $0.33 pound.  So I purchased the above bananas for less than a dollar and decided to dehydrate them to make a great snack.

This is my trusty Magic Chef food dehydrator that I purchased about 15 years ago on sale for around $20.  It works great for drying fruit and vegetables and making fruit leather, but it is a little noisy as it runs.

First I slice up the bananas about 1/8- 1/4 inch thick.  It's important the pieces are uniform in thickness so that they dry at the same rate.

Then soak the sliced bananas in a mixture of 2 cups water with 1/2 T. Fruit Fresh dissolved in it.  This will help keep your bananas from turning too brown (although they will be brownish when done drying).

Lay the bananas out on the trays. My machine has 5 trays, which I like to spray with cooking spray to make removing the fruit when it's dry easier.

Stack the trays onto the dehydrator base and start it up.  Depending on the thickness of your fruit and how dry you want it, it will take anywhere from 8-15 hours to dehydrate them.  I prefer my bananas to have a little chew and pliability to them when they are done.  This batch took just 8 hours to dry.

Enjoy your chewy, nutritious, and delicious snack!