For today’s Adventures in Homesteading, we’re heading to the kitchen!

Maegen of Sounds Fun Mom had recommended a book to me a few months back that I ended up snagging at Amazon: The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories (Amazon link).

This cookbook is chock-full of fun recipes and stories from pioneer cooking and living! For today’s post, I’m recreating one of them. It’s a Graham Bread recipe and it was served at the “New England Supper” in the Little Town on the Prairie. It uses a mix of whole wheat and regular white flour and molasses, which gives it a hearty flavor. Whole wheat breads take longer to rise, so this is a recipe you’ll want to devote the better part of a day to.

Start by mixing 4 cups whole wheat flour and 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour. Now this is what the recipe calls for, but it seemed very….floury. Given that, I’d probably start with the 4 cups of whole wheat and add the all-purpose flour in by 1/2 cupfuls until you have the right texture.

Dissolve two envelopes of yeast into 1/4 cup warm water. The water has to be warm for the yeast to activate, but too hot and you’ll kill it. It sure seemed like a LOT of yeast for the amount of water, but I can assure you this recipe works.

After the yeast sits for 5 minutes, you can add 1/4 cup molasses and then 2 more cups of warm water. Then you want to make a deep “well” in your flour mixture and dump the entire yeast/molasses/water mixture right into that well.

Starting from the middle, begin mixing the dry and wet ingredients together. Continue until the batter forms a stiff dough. Now I took my Kitchenaid to this dough at one point because it got really tough, but I’d caution you to not overmix your dough or over knead it. From what I’ve read, overdoing it on the whole wheat bread can make the final result very dense and tough. Not what you’re going for.

Lightly dust your dough ball with flour and let sit in a covered bowl to rise. I found it took about 2 hours.

Punch it down once it’s doubled in bulk and knead gently a few times on a floured surface.

Pull out into a rope and cut it in half to make two loaves.

Take each “loaf” and roll up and place in lightly oiled bread pans, turning the loaves to coat them. Cover, and let rise another 2 hours.

One trick I have to helping your bread rise faster is to put it in the oven with only the light on. It helps speed the process a bit. Here are my loaves, ready for baking. Bake them at 350° for about 35-40 minutes.

You’ll find your bread is easiest to slice if you let it sit overnight. (That is, if you can wait that long.)

I do believe this was one of my best bread attempts to date! The key here is patience, following the recipe closely, and putting a lot of love into it.

I ate a big slice topped with Fig Butter from Trader Joe’s.

Don’t you think Ma Ingalls would approve?

For more in this series including chicken raising, weed eating, and soap making, see my Adventures in Homesteading page.

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