Homemade bread!

One of my friends asked me on Facebook, after I shared this post;

 "It's Homemade Bread Day :)... (November 16)"

if I would share our bread recipe.
This recipe was adapted from Miss Tammy's Whole Wheat Bread recipe. Over the past four years we have slowly changed this or that measurement or technique, as we read more and more tips for making bread, and it has since turned to this :).
Here, without further ado... (This makes four loaves.)

9 cups of flour. We grinder our own wheat, and we use 6 cups of Hard Red Winter Wheat berries to make our 9 cups of flour. If you are not grinding your own wheat, just go with the 9 cups of flour, but it won't be quite the same. And try not to use Soft White Spring Wheat berries, whatever you do, haha :).
6 T. of ground flax seed.
3 T. yeast
1 T. salt
1/2 cup of wheat gluten
1/8 + 1/4 t. of ginger
1/4 t. vitamin C. We buy tablets and then just crush one for each batch of bread, but do as you see fit :). We've left it out a few times,and it hasn't been too much of an issue, but it is better with :).

Mix all this in a large bowl. Let sit while you mix together

3 cups of water
3/4 cup of honey
6 T. olive oil
3 T. of milk (water works, but, it is better following the recipe, if possible...)

Combine both of the mixtures in a mixing bowl and beat on a low speed, adding flour until it is a soft dough, pulling from the sides of the bowl.
Knead it in your mixer on a higher setting, unless you want to knead it by hand. But I doubt that will be an option unless you are doing this out of boredom :). We use our large Bosch mixer set on the second speed (medium-high), and leave it for about 15 minutes. You'll have to play around with this if you have another mixer, or use a bread machine, as I've never made it in anything else. If you are using a Bosch, this dough beats the sides a good bit. We suggest putting a metal bowl in front of the mixer so that the bowl falls off and makes a racket before the mixer if it decides to move to the edge of the counter. We have had the whole thing wiggle to the edge of the counter, and yank the plug out of the wall as it sailed through the air across the kitchen!!! Thankfully, nobody was in the kitchen, and it didn't break!

Leave it to sit in the mixer for about 5 minutes after it is done kneading. This allows it to "relax from it's beating" ;). While it sits, butter four bread pans. (Ours are about 4 1/2" by 8 1/2".) If you live in a cold climate, or it is winter, you may want to warm your pans just enough that they are no longer chilly to the touch. Those cold metal pans can greatly stunt the rising of your bread.

Now dump the dough out onto a counter, and cut into four equal parts. Place each loaf in a bread pan. You can mold it so that it fits the pan perfectly, like Tori does, or leave it as is, as I do. The end result is the same :).

Now comes the part that most people find very, very odd :)...
Get a fork, and stab your bread right in the middle. Long or short ways, is doesn't matter. That wasn't so bad, was it? Okay. Are you ready? (Stabbing it was to give it a "mouth".) You are going to burp your bread.
For those of you who care for babies regularly, this is second nature. For those of you who don't, this isn't too hard.
No, really. We call it burping the bread, but please don't burp your babies these way!
Give the bread one, hard, resounding slap! If you left a small indention of your hand print, you probably did it right ;). Now your bread will be bread through and through, with no air pockets causing big holes in your slices!

I set the oven to 200 degrees and leave it for three minutes, then turn off and slide the bread in to raise. Your oven may be different, though, so be careful. You want to warm the bread, not start cooking it :). Let rise for 20 minutes.

Leave your bread in the oven, and turn your oven on to 350 degrees. Bake the bread for 35 minutes, starting the timing from the time you turned on the oven, not from when it was done heating, until it is a good brown shade on the bottom. Get the rest of the bread out carefully after five minutes of sitting in the pan (It will be cooler, so harder to squish, and will have sweated just enough to make it come out easier without sogging the bread. still be careful, because you can ruin the look of your loaf if it is squished, which is easy ;). Use a turner to loosen the sides, and hold it so the back is what is touching the bread.

Done! Enjoy!!!
This sounds hard and time consuming, but after you're used to it, you can spend just about ten minutes of hands-on time to make four loaves of bread!