One-minute (whole grain) bread.

Whole grains are one of the most important foods to add to our diets. The Whole Grains Council recommends eating at least half of all of your grains whole, but I think it’s definitely better for you to eat as few refined grains (a.k.a. “grains with all the nutrition removed even if they’re ‘enriched’ which just means that they added back some nutrients so you don’t die” grains) as possible. One of the tastiest ways to eat whole grains is in bread! So… I have a very easy recipe for whole grain bread. And by “easy” I mean “one minute of prep time”, not “let’s spend all afternoon kneading dough”.

A while back, I discovered an awesome recipe for ciabatta bread with only one minute of prep time. But, as usual, the first time I made it I used too much water and it was okay but not great so I filed away the recipe and didn’t look at it again until the other day. Since I’m getting into artisan bread, I decided to try this easy recipe for practice. Tonight I perfected (so perfectly that of course I’ll never be able to duplicate the results) a whole wheat version of that recipe! It’s very simple. You just use whole wheat flour instead of white flour. It worked when I halved the recipe and made pizza dough, at least.

All you need is:

4 cups of whole wheat flour (or white whole wheat flour!)
2 cups of warm water
1 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of yeast

Instructions:
Mix the water and the yeast in a bowl. Add the flour and salt. Stir until you have a dough just softer than the consistency of playdough (it's better to err on the side of too dry, because if the dough has too much water it'll take a year and a half to bake). Now cover with a towel and walk away. Just walk away. Let it rise for 8 to 12 hours (or you could add some sugar or honey and it will not take as long), then just pour the dough onto a greased or floured cookie sheet (or baking stone, or whatever you make bread on) and smooth it out with a spoon (ciabatta should not be too thin, though; try an inch or so thick). Then bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes, then take it out of the oven and let it cool!

When I made it today I halved the recipe except for the yeast, which I kept at 1 tsp., and added a squirt of honey, and it rose in one hour (an hour too early, so I punched it down and it rose again). Half the recipe makes one large pizza, by the way.

Since I love to analyze nutritional content, I made a recipe file on one of my favorite websites, Nutritiondata.com.
According to the nutrition facts for this recipe, if you made pizza with this recipe, one slice would have 102 calories, one gram of fat and four grams of fiber! It’s also a good source of niacin, iron, selenium, manganese, and other vitamins and minerals. Read all the facts here. (I’ll try to post nutrition data for most of the recipes that I post here, by the way.)

I hope you enjoy this recipe! Let me know in the comments what you think.