Give us this day our daily bread.........

Happy Friday to everyone! My frugal tip for today is baking my own bread. Since we choose to eat unprocessed foods without preservative's or artificial ingredients it is very difficult to find some things in our grocery store. Yes, you can find good breads at the health food stores but at a very high price. I have bought one small loaf of bread from ours and paid over $5 for it. Now that is just too much for me to pay for bread. : ) So, I bake my own at a fraction of the cost.

I start out by purchasing a 50 pound bag of hard red wheat berries. That is only a little over $17. About the price of three loaves of bread from the health food store.

I load up the Nutrimill flour grinder with the wheat berries.
In a few minutes those wheat berries are turned into nutritious whole wheat flour.
Next, I put my ingredients for my bread into the Bosch mixer. What a time/labor saver this machine is!

I put 6 cups of hot tap water (we have spring water), 3/4 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup honey or agave, 2TBSP sea salt, 8 cups of the flour, 1/3 cup wheat gluten and 4 TBSP instant yeast. Turn the machine on and mix until everything is moistened. Then I add the next 8 cups of flour one at a time while the mixer is running. Put the lid on and let it knead the dough for 10 minutes.

It looks like this when the 10 minutes are up.

Oh oh! Look who woke up and came into the kitchen to tell me they were hungry!

I have four 12 inch long loaf pans greased and ready for the dough.

The dough is taken out of the mixer and put on the very clean oiled counter.The dough is cut into 4 sections. Which should be equal in size, but mine never are! ; )

The dough is placed in the pans. I let them sit there for a minute or two while I wash up the mixer bowl and my measuring cups and spoons.Into the oven they go at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. What to do for 25 minutes now? Oh yeah, fold a load of clothes and throw the next load into the washer and dryer.

And here are my 4 different sized loaves of bread! Just in time for breakfast for my two hungry girls. Let's see what else besides warm bread with fresh cherry jam?

Fresh eggs from the hen house of course!Aren't those pretty eggs? Now where are those hungry girls?

Breakfast is served in the kitchen of Bountiful Acres! Enjoy my sweet little daughters!

NOTE* I figured the cost of my ingredients and have come up with the cost for the bread I bake myself. It comes out to about a dollar per loaf. I find that quite frugal for wholesome bread to feed my family.