When Bread Recipes Fail

I’ve been using the same whole wheat bread recipe for several weeks. It was great at first, especially right out of the machine. But after it sat for a couple of days, it would get harder and harder. Eventually neither one of us wanted to eat it. It's not good sandwich bread at all....we are kinda over it now.

So I decided to experiment and tweak the recipe based on what I gathered from other bloggers. I wanted to keep the bread as pure as possible (free from refined ingredients or random additives) but find some way to make it softer for longer. After just a small tweak, I ended up with a brick of bread right from the start! 

I think I ate a couple of slices. Then Adam tried a PB&J for lunch and didn’t get far at all before it ended up in the trash. Nope…we were not forcing this one down.

I hate wasting food, so my only options were to feed the turtles (yes, there is a colony of turtles that live at our apartment complex) or make bread crumbs. 

I opted for bread crumbs. I’ll visit the turtles on another day.

To make bread crumbs, I just broke up the bread into smallish pieces and spread them on a baking sheet. Then I put it in the oven on the lowest setting for 1-2 hours. 

After determining that all the moisture was out of the bread, I tried to crunch the pieces into crumbs. They were too hard so I stuck them in my mini food-processor. After a few cup-fulls I ended up with a jar of whole wheat bread crumbs!

So easy. 

And hooray for one less item to buy at the grocery store!

Now to find a bread recipe that works…