View from the Mountain: Taking the dough in my own hands

When you get older, experience tells you a few important things are worth doing yourself.

Getting a good start to the day has always been important to me.

It probably comes from having a farm for over a decade.

If you try to go out and do farm work on a wimpy breakfast, you are going to get in trouble.

I was really lucky when we were on the farm. At that time my wife seemed to love to bake. There was nothing better than coming back from a morning of hard work to a kitchen filled with the smell of fresh baked bread.

I will have to admit that she spoiled me with all that homemade bread.

Since leaving the farm, breakfast has always been one of my favorite meals.

The older that I have gotten, the more I like whole grain breads. I have been fortunate to live mostly in areas where good breads were easy to find.

That is not the case on the Carolina coast. I have been unable to find good whole wheat breads that meet my standards.

My wife did her turn at the dough board so I could not really ask her to make it for me.

That really left me only one choice. That was to start baking my own bread.

I have had a little experience at it over the years and most recently tried my hand at using a bread maker in November 2005.

I enjoyed the bread maker bread, but I could not find a recipe that I liked. We also do not have room for another appliance at our coastal home.

So this time I decided to get serious. After managing to buy a bread pan over my wife's protests, I finally came upon the basis of a good recipe on a bag of whole wheat flour.

I have been experimenting for the last few weeks, and I think I am pretty close to writing up the recipe which besides whole wheat flour, contains cracked wheat, millet, and oatmeal flakes. It also has no added fat.

This last loaf I baked (shown in the picture above) even shows some tiny air bubbles so I may soon have it perfected.

It is already a great bread and a wonderful accompaniment for Martime, one of my favorite breakfast foods.

Baking really does not take much time (with no kids around) and the tasty results are well worth the effort. It is certainly a healthy alternative to store bought bread.

I will post my recipe once I have it completely nailed down.