Ronnie’s been playing with our bread machine lately and seems finally to have nailed the perfect wholemeal loaf. We use a mix of wholemeal flour, plain flour and rye (all organic) but only finally achieved some sort of fluffiness and rise after taking some advice from Daniel Leader of Local Breads. He mentioned that wholemeal flours can handle a lot more water than others and that a longer knead time (the last one) can also help. We’ve made these adjustments to the program we started off from (the standard bread-machine wholemeal) and presto! Yummy bread!
Prior to this we had already taken the advice of another artisan bread maker and abandoned the oil listed in the recipe in the book for water and left out the milk powder.
The glass of beer in the photo is to provide some sort of scale, although seeing it next to the bread did prompt one thought. Now that I can make cheese and Ron can make bread we only need to start using our beer brewing kit to be, at least in Dutch terms, entirely self-sufficient! The fact that we also have potatoes growing in the garden is just icing on the cake. The fruit and vegetable, well that’s just showing off, een beetje overdreven! 😉
postcards from the north 
life sounds pretty idyllic at your place… chooks, vegies, bread and beer! what more could you want?? :o)
Oh…. have I neglected to mention the piles of undone ironing, the dust, the weeds, the plaster falling of the walls…. ….?
Looks amazing. I am a complete newbie when it comes to breadmaking. How long does one loaf take to do, on average?
Ronnie xo