Wholemeal Milk Bread - A Healthier Alternative

Due to health reasons, my parents only eat wholemeal bread. However, we have no control over the percentage of wholemeal flour vs bread flour for the wholemeal bread we bought off the shelves.

This is also one of the reasons why my mom and I have decided to get a breadmaker. I have tried the recipe that comes from the instruction menu of Song-Cho breadmaker. It turned out ok.. but a bit on the dense and coarse side. Can't really say we enjoy it very much.

I have tried and tested a few other recipes but failed quite miserably. One thing I noticed for wholemeal bread is that the dough is normally more sticky and watery than normal bread dough. This is especially true if the wholemeal flour makes up of a high percentage of the recipe. I used the breadmaker to knead for a very long time but the dough just doesn't seem to come together. And because the dough is too watery, there's not enough structure to support the bread when it proof and often collapse before it goes into the oven.

I was on the verge of giving up making wholemeal bread till I chanced upon this recipe.

This recipe produces nice fluffy wholemeal bread. This recipe used ratio of more 50% wholemeal bread vs bread flour. While I would love to have higher content of wholemeal flour, I am happy with this recipe for now since those recipes with higher wholemeal flour content fail.

Recipe adapted from Little Corner of Mine

*I have halved the recipe to test if this recipe works for me.

This bread dough is partially knead my Song-Cho Breadmaker and baked in my Morris tabletop oven.

Ingredients:

200ml milk

14g butter (melted or soften)
2 + 1/4 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

114g wholemeal flour

85g bread flour

1 tsp yeast

How to do:

1. Pour the ingredients into the bread barrel according to the sequence from top to bottom up except for yeast. 

2. Place sugar and salt in the different corner of barrel.
3. Make a well in the bread flour and put the yeast into the well.
4. Select menu '5. Sweet' on the breadmaker & press start.
5. I stopped the machine after it completed it Rise2 with the intention to mould them into buns. However, when I took out the dough, it was still quite fluid and sticky, can't hold it shape well. So I proceed to kneading it with my hands on a lightly floured surface. It took me about 45min of kneading before I am satisfied with the texture of the dough. It is still soft but able to hold its shape better. It also become less sticky.

The ingredients above fill about four muffin cups and one 4.5 inch cake pan (3 buns).

6. Allow the dough to go through another round of proofing till it doubled in size. I followed the original recipe method of putting 2 bowl of hot water at the lower rack of the oven and place my muffin cups and cake pan on the middle rack for proof. It took about 20 minutes to almost double in size.

7. Remove the muffin cups and cake pan from the oven and start to pre-heat the oven at 170 degree celsius. Meanwhile the dough will continue to proof at room temperature till it double in size.

8. Bake in my oven for about 15 min.

:: Wholemeal Bread ~ 3 Buns in 4.5" Cake Pan ::

:: Soft & fluffy like white bread ::

I will attempt this recipe again and hopefully find a suitable mode on breadmaker to knead the dough fully so that I won't have to work my muscle.