Light Wholemeal Milk bread (bread machine recipe)

Once I started down the road of making sure Anjalie enjoyed Home-made meals, most of the days, the next step was to try baking my own bread. With a Bread machine to ease the process, I fell in love with baking fresh bread and, needless to say, both Naz & Anjalie enjoy them as well. Still, white bread is the most popular bread in demand here. But now and again, I try to sneak in a healthier version of bread such as whole-meal bread. One of the healthy, but, popular loaf at home is the light wholemeal milk bread. The light wholemeal bread uses a mixture of white and wholemeal flour thus yields a fairly light brown loaf. The use of milk means that the bread is soft and sweeter compared to bread made with water. The lactulose sugars in milk are not used by yeast so the bread tastes sweeter. But it will look darker than bread made with water. So set it to medium/light bread to bake in the bread machine. It is great for peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. It will be a hit with children due to the sweeter taste. Also due to the milk in the loaf it will keep good for longer, although, we usually finish ours within 2 days max. The recipe below is for a small loaf.

 You will need:
1 and 1/2 cups lukewarm milk
2 and 1/4 cups whole-wheat bread flour
1 cup white bread flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoon butter/vegetable oil
1 tablespoon milk powder
1 teaspoon rapid-raise active dry yeast

1.Pour warm milk into the bread machine pan. If the instructions for your bread machine specify that yeast is to be added first, reverse the order in which you add the liquid and dry ingredients to the pan to what is given here.

2. Sprinkle each kind of flour over, in turn, ensuring that the water is well covered.




3. Add the salt, sugar, butter and milk powder to the four corners of the bread pan. Make a shallow indentation in the centre of the flour and add yeast. make sure that this indentation does not reach all the way to the water.

4. Choose basic/normal setting with medium crust cycle in the bread machine and press start.

5. At the end of the baking cycle, remove bread immediately and turn it on to a wire rack to cool. It is important to remove the bread at the end of the baking cycle to avoid sweating. Otherwise it can lead to the bread getting soggy.

Note: The recipe can be used for making bread by hand-kneading and then baking in the conventional oven.  In conventional oven bake at 160/170 instead of 180 degrees.