Holiday or Everyday Easy, Healthy Wheat Bread Recipe

At the Holiday Recipe Exchange we love to make bread. Store bought is o.k. for plain old sandwiches but home made fresh breads far outshine those little square slices filled with preservatives and things you can't pronounce.  Holidays are special times for you and your families and that's when you should put out the effort to bake-up something extra special for all to enjoy.  My husband and I make at least one and usually two loaves every week and they always seem to disappear almost over night. Yum Yum, warm with butter on top they're irresistable!

But you say, who has time to make up a bread recipe with all the stirring and kneading and kneading and...?

The answer is....yea you guessed it...a bread machine. Now, I know that's a real cop out if you are a purest type however, I have very little use of my hands and so kneading and holding on to stirring spoons is very difficult and painful.  So, why not use a bread machine? It's fast, it's accurate and you get the best of everything.  In fact the only thing I see as a drawback to a bread machine is the extra large slices it produces. They never fit into my toaster without cutting them in half.  But, the excellent toast they make make it worth the extra effort.

But don't you have to use special flour and yeasts and stuff in a bread recipe?

No, actually  you don't.  There is a slight difference in the amount of rise you get if you use regular all purpose flour but it isn't enough to worry about and you can often compensate for the difference by altering the standard bread machine recipes just a little. With basic white breads the texture is a little coarser and with wheat breads we've found we get a smaller and denser loaf using the bread machine recipes.  However, we just came up with a wheat recipe that is dinamite!  The loaf rises completely to the maximum height, the texture is very fine and the bread is moist but not soggy.  This recipe is so good, I'm going to share it only with the readers who subscribe to our Holiday Recipe Exchange Newsletter.  That will be an incentive to coax you to join our family!  Well, for now that's going to be it.  Mikey is in the kitchen brewing up a new soda pop recipe and he wants me to come taste it.  I think it has ginger and dandelion extracts and who knows what else?