Mouse River Homestead Bread

Welcome to the next installment of the Bread Baker’s Series!  Again, we’ve teamed up with 1840 Farm to bring you a large variety of bread recipes and bread making tips.  Our hope is that you will begin to work bread baking into your life if you haven’t already.  Make it when it’s convenient for you.  The more you bake bread, the more you may find yourself feeling guilty whenever you buy bread from the bakery or grocery store, knowing that you can make a loaf of bread equally as delicious and for a fraction of the cost.

Mouse River Homestead Bread is a sourdough bread with a characteristically tangy flavor and dense, moist texture.

As this is a sourdough bread, we’re going to talk a little bit about sourdough bread.  Baking bread with a sourdough starter is slightly different from traditional bread baking techniques.  It’s slower.  This recipe has a little yeast in it (and oddly enough, some baking soda too) to help quicken the rising process.  However, with traditional sourdough bread, sourdough starter is the only leavening agent.

Sourdough bread needs a lot of time to rise.  In our whole wheat bread recipe, we take the bread straight from kneading to be shaped into loaves and then to rise for about 30 minutes before being baked.  Sourdough bread needs more than 30 minutes to rise.  Even recipes that have yeast.  We recommend letting it rise for 2 hours after kneading, then punch it down, shape it into loaves and let it rise until double in size.

Don’t expect a soft, fluffy loaf here.  This bread is meant to be dense and moist.  It’s delicious with a little bit of strawberry rhubarb jam and also makes amazing sandwiches of all kinds.  Go ahead and give this one a try.

Mouse River Homestead Bread

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Ingredients

• 2 T butter, melted
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 T honey*
• 2 cups sourdough starter**
• 2 tsp salt*
• 1 tsp baking soda*
• 1 T yeast*
• 3 1/2 cups wheat, rye, or white flour*

*These ingredients can be found in our store.
**Sourdough starter recipe can be found here.

Instructions

Melt butter in saucepan. Add milk and honey. Turn into the mixing bowl of your stand mixer equipped with a dough hook.

Add sourdough starter, salt, baking soda, yeast, and flour.  (Note: You can use any combination of these flours.  In this particular batch, we used a combination of all three.)

Knead until smooth. (About 6-8 minutes)  Use the windowpane test to determine when the gluten is fully developed.

Rise until double. Punch down. Divide into two loaves. Rise again until double.

Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.

The Bread Baker’s Series is a creative collaboration between Kitchen Kneads and 1840 Farm.  To be sure that you don’t miss out on any of the posts in this series, subscribe to our email, or follow us on Facebook or Pinterest.  You can also become a member of the 1840 Farm community via email, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

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