Baking Bread | Week One

So this I week officially began my self-imposed bread challenge which is to make some sort of bread product every week. The end goal is to be able to make all our bread and not have to buy any. I’ve heard that when you make your bread at home you can save so much money! Just buying the ingredients  and making it from scratch will save you money. Take it a step further and buy the ingredients in bulk, you save more money. Then take it one step further and….grind you’re own wheat that you bought in bulk (or your brother bought for you) and you’ve just saved even more money and upped the nutrition as well as flavor. Thanks to my big brother I now have enough wheat to bake bread to my heart’s content and use freshly ground flour. He drew my name for Christmas this year so of course we had to set up my new grinder and try it out while all the family was there.

Here’s me giving it a go. Let me tell you, grinding your own wheat really gives you a work out!

Here’s my niece grinding away! She wasn’t even tired afterwards. Oh, to be young and energetic again!

Here’s the end result:

And there’s my brother holding Teddi while we continue working on the flour later that evening. He look’s a LITTLE scared! Hehe!

This week I started with an olive oil recipe from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. One recipe makes about 4 pounds of dough and keeps in the fridge for about a week.   I made breadsticks (not pictured because we ate them all before I had a chance to photograph them. They we’re that good!

I’ve also made pizza crust…

and a smaller loaf of bread that we used to make patty melts with green chile on ground elk meat

and some regular sandwiches too.

We supplemented some ham & cheese sandwiches of days later with whole wheat store-bought bread after that was gone. That’s okay with me at this point.  In the past I probably would have just put a frozen pizza in the oven and eaten butter bread with our spaghetti-good but not as tasty as the breadsticks. Just one step at a time,right?