better bread?

We’ve been making a lot of this no-knead bread lately, and really loving it. However, it doesn’t exactly fit in with healthier eating, or reduced calorie consumption. Not that it’s inherently bad for you, it’s just a bunch of white flour, and it’s so good that it’s really easy to eat half a loaf without noticing. The kids really love it, especially Dakota, so they eat a lot too. What it comes down to is that we try to eat mostly whole-grain bread. The bread I make for our sandwiches and toast, etc is mostly whole wheat and oatmeal, with just a little white flour to help with leavening.

Anyway, I felt I needed to try making this with at least some whole grain flour. I know there books out there that have fancier recipes, but I don’t have them, so I thought I’d just stick to the basics and use the same recipe I’d been using. I pretty much follow it, with a couple of changes: I used 2 Cups whole wheat flour and 1 Cup all-purpose flour. We’ve also been using 1 1/2 Cups water instead of 1 5/8 Cups water as the original recipe states. We got this tip from Rose Levy Beranbaum. This last time I made it I also used parchment paper for it to sit on for the final rise, rather than the floured muslin we’d been using. We were having trouble with the floured muslin sticking to the dough and turning into a big mess when we turned it into the baking dish (or so covered with flour that it was a bit unappetizing once it came out of the oven caked with a quarter inch of plain flour). The parchment paper worked very well, thank goodness. Oh, and we don’t have a nice cast iron dutch oven, so we bake it in our slightly-too-small Corningware casserole dish.

I don’t know that this makes a “better” bread. The crust is a bit chewy, rather than crisp and crackly, and the loaf is just more dense and chewy over-all. It was good, though, and certainly better for us. I’m sure we’ll make the all-white version still from time to time, but the whole wheat one is tasty enough to accompany dinner on a regular basis. Which is nice because it means the more ingredient-heavy, time-consuming sandwich bread will last a bit longer.