Whole Wheat Bread Recipe: Easy, 2-Ingredients, Flawless Every Time

Bread is a staple food in large parts of the world. Long ago, there wasn’t such a thing as white bread. But some bright nut had the idea to filter out, and throw away, the most nutritious part of the bread flour. Since then, diseases and obesity skyrocketed in society. This includes mental disease, as brain health is definitely also dependent on adequate nutrition.

Why Eat White Bread

Nothing tastes better than fresh whole-wheat bread which you bake yourself on the same day. I dislike the empty bland taste of white bread. To add injury to insult, the empty starch and calories in white bread poisons your body by creating nutrient deficiencies.

No-one benefits from supermarket white bread with added chemicals for extended shelf-life. To say that white bread “tastes better”, is extremely subjective and dependent on whether you destroyed your taste buds with junk food.

Most people work during the daytime at some non health-related job. Thus, they never ponder very deeply about exactly what they fuel their bodies with. Then down the line, illness happens.

The golden rule is: what you put in, is what you get out. Thus, if you get sick, you see a doctor, and you’re left with medical expenses. If only everyone would eat healthier proactively, it’ll have massive benefits for public health budgets. However, it’ll also lead to much less profit for big pharma.

Baking Bread

Initially, I wasn’t very good with baking bread. Since I don’t consume dairy products, the bread had to be dairy-free. Thus, I simply mixed whole wheat flour with water, for the first few attempts. It was a nice experiment but the bread was hard as a rock. So, next I got some instant yeast – an essential ingredient. But you still gotta know how to use it. This includes first kneading the bread and letting it rise.

At first, I believed you need to add a tablespoon or two of brown sugar, to allow the bread to rise. The theory was that the yeast feeds on and gets activated by the sugar. However, adding sugar isn’t necessary. This is because there are starches already present in the flour, which the yeast can feed on.

After you mix and knead the bread to let the dough rise, you can knead it a second time. This all makes the bread more porous – a texture similar to store-bought bread.

It wasn’t an overnight success to get my bread’s texture right. But practice makes perfect. At first, I was also wary about ruining the bread texture by adding unusual flours, plus ingredients like sunflower or pumpkins seeds. There was the concern that you could puncture the yeast bubbles in the bread, with rough ingredients like very coarse whole wheat flours. However, this is not something you need to worry about. You can still get the exact same light texture with homemade whole wheat bread.

All those extra weird bread ingredients, including milk, butter, eggs, preservatives and other dumb chemicals, are not necessary. It’s only added to give the bread a longer shelf-life. But this is at the expense of your health.

You can really play around with this recipe. It’s genuinely hard to screw up a basic vegan whole wheat bread. I’m not a professional chef, but I’m telling you what works for me. And if it works for me, then why won’t it work for you?

 

Potential Mistakes

• If the dough is too runny:   Add more flour.
• If the flour is not well-mixed into the dough: Add more water.
• Too long in the oven: The bread will burn.
• Too short in the over: The dough will still be wet inside, and not baked through.

Ingredients

• 100% pure whole wheat flour (around 2 to 3 cups – all depends how large loaf of bread you want). Also check on the sachet of yeast, what their flour weight recommendation is. For example, my yeast indicates I can use between 500gram to 1kg of flour in my recipe. Stick to this guidance.
• 1 sachet of instant yeast
• Clean mineral water until you get the perfect consistency. Adding 40% water for every cup of flour, is usually an accurate estimate. It doesn’t have to be store-bought water. I go to a mineral water spring in my city, to fill up my clean water supplies for free.

You can mix or replace with any other flour if you want, e.g. Wholemeal Rye, Almond- or Coconut Flour. Plus, you could add e.g. pumpkin or sunflower seeds, chia seed, sesame, flaxseed powder, and so on, to your dough. All of these improves the nutrient profile of the bread.

Adding some natural salt, such as sea salt or Himalayan salt is also an option. This adds a slight nutty flavor to the bread. As an experiment, I baked 2 loaves of bread beside one another. One loaf had salt, one didn’t. The taste difference was small, and the texture difference even smaller. So it’s totally optional.

 

 

Instructions – Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

 

1. Put Flours into a bowl
2. Add the yeast
3. Add the water
4. Mix the yeast and water thoroughly
5. Let it rise
6. Mix and knead it a little again (optional)
7. Let it rise a second time
8. Slightly grease the baking tin.
9. Turn on the oven at around 200 Degrees Celsius. This temperature works for my oven. Even 185 Deg Celsius is fine. Thus play around with this. You don’t want the bread to either burn, or still be wet inside.
10. Then bake the bread for 40 minutes. This is sufficient time for the dough to bake through to the center.
11. Enjoy the bread.

Whole Wheat Bread Nutrition Benefits

White flour consists only of the wheat endosperm. The Fiber-rich bran coating is removed, as well as the nutrient-rich wheat germ. Thus, once again, avoid white flour. Let’s emphasize again home-made whole wheat bread health benefits:

• You’re getting much more fiber in
• No Preservatives (like with store-bought bread)
• White Breads get fortified with artificial vitamins. These vitamins are NOT THE SAME as natural vitamins. Nutrition textbooks actually discourage supplementing with artificial vitamins.
• Wholewheat bread contains plenty more health-boosting B-Vitamins (than white bread).
• It also contain a lot more minerals such as Folic Acid (“Folate”), Magnesium, Iron, and Potassium.

 

Below is a short 5 minute instructional video I made to accompany this blogpost:

 

Have you ever tried baking your own bread? How does your method differ from above? There isn’t necessarily a “right” and “wrong” way. It depends how you prefer your bread. Comment below your tips and questions for other readers!