Bread Baking Day

I’ve been baking bread on and off for a few years now. Mostly only baking bread that I can do with my Cuisinart, thinking it is much easier than the process by hand. If I were to bake bread 100% of the time never buying, we’d need 1-2 loaves a day. I’ve experimented with bread recipes because I’ve felt that I could never get it right. I’ve never been happy with the bread I’ve baked. I bake with 100% hard whole wheat and it doesn’t rise as nicely so a friend told me to use wheat gluten and that helped some. So I went on baking with my Cuisinart and trying different recipes that fit the machine. A couple weeks ago Kelsey and I started a tradition (I’ve spoke of here before) where we get up and milk and when we are done she puts together bread for the Cuisinart and we bake 2 loaves everyday. She LOVES it. This past Friday, however, I decided that I wanted to FINALLY try my grandma Syverson’s recipe for whole wheat bread, the one that makes 6 loaves. I’ve never tried it before because it wouldn’t fit in the Cuisinart AND it seemed to be such a detailed recipe using such things as scalded milk and melted fat. And the recipe (written out by her hand) didn’t tell me HOW to do it just listed ingredients. So because I was unfamiliar with how to put it together I never tried it. Friday I got brave. I wanted 6 loaves and wanted to try her recipe. So with another of her recipes in hand that had more detail (it was a similar recipe for bread, just made only 3 loaves) Kelsey and I went at it. After the first rise in that big bowl in the picture I was SOLD!!! NEVER NEVER had my bread rose like this bread did. It filled that big bowl! When I put it in the pans to rise…it filled the pans the way all the recipes have told they should and I’ve never been able to do. It was beautiful!!! It is SO tasty too and cuts so nicely, not crumbly. All along I’ve been searching for the easy way (by machine) and never been able to find a recipe to work, never having bread rise well. And all I needed to do was to look to grandma, the woman who baked bread all her life.