Whole Wheat Bread

After our successful experiment with homemade pizza, we didn’t think making a single loaf of wheat bread in the Zojirushi BBCCX20 would be much of a challenge, we were wrong.

Ingredients

This part couldn’t have been easier. You simply put everything in the bread pan and you’re done. Unfortunately the recipe called for 1 1/8 cups of water. 1 is easy, we handled that flawlessly, but we didn’t have a measuring cup for 1/8 of a cup. Being Internet guys we went straight for the Google conversion tool. The great and powerful Google quickly let us know that 1/8 cup = 2 tablespoons. The first hurdle of the day was easily cleared.

Mixing

mixing This part of the project really helped us understand the appeal of the bread machine. We put the pan in the machine and pushed start. I was really impressed by the mixing capabilities of the machine. My wife uses a Bosch Mixer and I didn’t think the two little paddles could mix all of our ingredients, but they performed very well. We’ve read that shaping the dough can really help but we wanted to see what the machine would do on it’s own, so we headed out the door and let the Zojirushi do it’s job.

Opening The Lid

This was one pathetic loaf of bread. I’m not sure how to describe the top, but it doesn’t really look like bread. We also managed to get the crust overdone.

ouch

The Feast

Brent: I thought it tasted good but I’m sure someone else could have made it taste much better.

Matt: It looked ugly and the crust was awful, but the rest of the bread tasted pretty good. This is definately one we will have to try again.

Shameless Product Promotion

One of our main reasons for performing these experiments is learning more about these products. We’re going to pass what we like on to you. You can make whole wheat bread without any of these products but we thought they were pretty useful.

Zojirushi BBCCX20
I’m sure this project isn’t going to convince anyone to buy a Zojirushi, but don’t give up on it yet, it was our first time with a bread machine.

Norpro Slicing Guide
This was nice. I hate trying to slice homemade bread. Our knife wasn’t quite long enough for it but it was still better than trying to slice it without one.