 Changing Your Family's Eating Habits to Whole Wheat Bread
I was talking to a customer this week about this very subject , and I thought it would be a good topic to do a short post for the blog. We all know we should be eating better so we will have a better quality of life, live longer more healthier and enjoy our lives without illness. I have found out over the years, that the women are usually on board about changing their eating habits and lifestyles than the rest of the family and in many cases especially their husbands or better halves. Many have said to me " I love 100% whole wheat bread, but I can't get my children, teenagers or husbands to eat it. They just don't like the texture, the bran taste, the colour, the heaviness etc., etc, etc. I have given much council over the years on how to change these complaints and gradually ease the family over to whole wheat bread. It is really not a good idea to completely change over to whole wheat bread by going cold turkey. Most digestive systems cannot handle the loads of extra fibre that it would receive and would cause a lot of bloating and gas and possibly long visits to the bathroom. We have always suggested that a more gradually change over a month's time would be a better way to go. We can make our regular whole wheat bread recipe here, with a few changes, into a white bread recipe, or mostly white bread recipe. It will not be as healthy to start with but the health factor will increase with each successive bread baking. My first suggestion is to master the basic bread recipe with about a 90% to 10% ratio of white flour to whole wheat. Many of you will be using a Bosch Kitchen Machine to do this so I am going to discuss the method of making in that machine. When making white bread I generally make the same recipe as the whole wheat but change the sweetener to white sugar, add about 1/2 cup of non instant skim milk powder and maybe an egg in with the liquid. I would put in 2 cups of whole wheat milled flour and 6 cups of white to the first addition of flour to mix in before I really start to knead in another 6 -8 cups of white bread flour into the dough. This bread tends to turn out fairly light especially if you have included a few Tbsp. of gluten flour. Once you have this perfected and the family loves it. Now you start adding a few more cups of the whole wheat flour to the first addition of flour. That means the next time you make it the dough will have 4 cups of whole wheat flour and 2 less of the white flour. More often than not the family doesn't notice the increase in the whole wheat by this point but will notice the bread tastes even better. The next time you make bread use 6 cups of the whole wheat flour, and so on for over a 1 to 3 month period. By the time you are using 100% whole wheat flour the family generally hasn't really noticed the difference. You can keep the texture light by increasing the amount of extra gluten added by using 1 more Tbsp. as you increase the cups of whole wheat flour. The fresh milled kind that we do in our Nutrimill grain mill, will have a better flavour than store bought as well as more nutrients, but if you are buying flour the same system will work to change them over. In my conversation with my customer, she mentioned that they ran out of bread and went to the grocery store to buy a loaf in the meantime. Apparently her husband remarked how much better her homemade bread tasted than the flavourless store-bought loaf. He was converted! If you have any other ideas on changing your families eating habits in any way feel free to answer this post and we would be glad to add to the list. |
Changing Your Family's Eating Habits to Whole Wheat Bread
