Here’s a simple whole wheat bread recipe. 17-16: Whole Wheat Baguette has “baguette” in the name, but you could use this same recipe to make buns, rolls, sandwich bread, or any other shape you prefer. This is more of a utilitarian recipe more than anything else–nothing fancy here.
Baguettes are indeed long, thin loaves of French bread (French bread being a type of dough, not a type of shape). I made short, thin individual loaves instead, which the Wikipedia article I linked to calls demi-baguettes, although mine are probably even shorter than that. I thought individually-sized ones might be an interesting experiment instead of one or two long loaves.
TYPO alert! The header above spells baguette as B-A-Q-U-E-T-T-E, using a “Q” instead of a “G”. Doesn’t really matter, it’s just interesting that it made it all the way to print/production with that error.
TIPS section suggests making garlic bread out of your baguette–other ideas include French-bread pizza, crostinis, or a giant sub sandwich.
Ingredients. Not much to it, essentially just flour, water, salt, and yeast. That’s even the title of one of my favorite bread cookbooks, Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.
Soaking the wheat germ.
Gets goopy pretty quickly.
Water at the right temperature. After you make enough bread, you really don’t need the thermometer anymore–you can tell just by touch if the water’s the right temperature. However, this makes a better visual.
Working in the whole wheat flour. Simply Delicious has had some other whole wheat bread recipes–check out 17-5: Hot Seedy Rolls or 17-22: Bread Loaves with Creamy Filling for some other uses for that bag of whole wheat flour you now have.
If you’re looking for some recipes to use your soon-to-be loaves with, consider some of our past posts like 1-28: Picnic Tuna Sandwiches or 9-5: Modern-Style Hamburger.
Rolled the initial dough ball.
After letting it rise. I feel like using all whole-wheat flour made it tougher and denser than it would have been had I used the whole-wheat/all-purpose ratio they mentioned in the recipe. Take that into consideration if you want a fluffier, springier bread.
Rolled my demi-baguettes and left them to rise on a Silpat.
After proofing my mini-loaves.
Sliced them as best as I could–it’s tough when they’re small.
After baking. They were a bit thinner than I had intended–I suppose I thought they were going to poof out more while baking. If I did it again I’d probably make like 4 slightly bigger ones rather than 8 smaller ones. Bread was decent, but tasted like wheat bread–you’re either into wheat or you’re not.
Grade: A-
