Whole Wheat Apple Honey Braid

For most baking that I do I use fresh ground wheat from my Wonder Mill, which I love! I use many different kinds of wheat and grains in my baking. This dough used organic soft white wheat berries milled on the pastry setting.

I used several recipes to come up with this final product - replacing sugar with honey and honey granules, replacing all-purpose white flour with fresh milled wheat flour, and so forth.

Whole Wheat Apple Honey Braid

Bread Dough:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1/3 cup olive oil*
1/3 cup honey
1 egg
1 tsp salt
5 heaping cups fresh milled flour **
1 Tbsp yeast

Put all the Bread Dough ingredients in your break maker in the order your manufacturer recommends. (I use a Zojirushi which calls for wet then dry ingredients.) Set the machine to the setting and start. As the dough mixes check on it to be sure you are getting the right dough consistency. (See note ** below.)

* NOTE: The key to good olive oil that doesn't make baked goods taste funny and like olive oil is buying olive oil that is bottled at the source in Italy or Greece. If it has been imported then bottled, then you take a chance on the oil tasting funny or too much like "olive oil". This is because the distributor may bottle the olive oil with other oils to make it cheaper. This sounds funny since you are using olive oil, but trust me on this! I buy my big jug of Kirkland organic olive oil at Costco - be sure to check the label because some are not bottled at the source.

** NOTE: Fresh milled flour is fluffier and airier than the bagged flour in stores. 5 cups is a good starting point but you may need more as you watch the dough develop. If it is to wet and sticky, add an additional 1/4-1/2 cup at a time as it mixes until you get the right dough consistency.

Apple Filling:
3 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
3 Tbsp honey
2 tsp cinnamon
1 Tbsp lemon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

While the bread dough is working in the bread machine, in a small casserole dish, toss the Apple Pie Filling ingredients together until all evenly coated. Bake in the oven 15-20 minutes. Apples should still be a little crunchy, not soft. (Be careful not to grab a spoon and eat them all now!)

When the dough is complete, dump out onto a lightly oiled surface. Gently knead a few times. Roll out into 1/4" think rectangle. Move to parchment lined baking sheet. (I learned this after the fact - learn from my mistake!)

Slice edges in 1" wide strips  on both sides to look like a fringe.

Pile cooked apples down center of dough. Be careful not to get all the juices in there or your final product will be soggy and doughy. I sprinkled a little extra granulated honey and cinnamon but that's optional. Pile more apples than what you see below. I was being conservative and in hindsight pile more on there!

Gently fold strips of dough over center of apples criss-crossing so they resemble a braid.

Bake the braid in the 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.

Glaze:
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 tsp milk or half and half
pinch of fresh grated nutmeg ***

*** NOTE: Fresh grated nutmeg, oh my! I buy whole nutmeg and grate it as I need it. Once you use fresh grated nutmeg you will NEVER buy bottled powdered nutmeg again. Trust me on this!

Brush the glaze on the still hot apple braid. Let it cool about 5 minutes. Slice it up and serve.

Spelt anyone?

In an effort to learn more about grains and use more healthy grains since I live in a house of breadhounds, I bought a couple of new flours at an area health food store. They fresh grind all of their flours or you can buy it in bulk yourself and grind your own. That is what my end goal is - to grind my own. But I want to try different grains to determine if that will work for the family. So I bought some spelt, hard red ground ultrafine, and soft white ground ultrafine. We would probably be buying the hard red wheat or soft white wheat in bulk so I wanted to be sure I tried those.

So Friday morning for breakfast after looking at these flours I bought, I went for it! I made my regular 3 cups of flour recipe for buttermilk pancakes but substituted 1/2 c spelt and 1/2 c red whole wheat for 1 c of unbleached white. I knew I had to go gradual for fear of a pancake revolt. So my recipe turned out to be 1/2 c spelt, 1/2 c red whole wheat, 2 c unbleached white flour along with the other ingredients. They tasted great and no texture difference. The kids didn't even notice! Cool! Next time I will go for a higher amount of wheat and spelt. Or I may try kamut or amaranth wheat.

That evening I also modified my pizza dough recipe that is the family favorite which is already 1 1/2 c whole wheat flour and 1 1/2 c white flour. But I put in 1/2 c spelt and 1 c of the hard red wheat in place of the normal King Arthur whole wheat I use. In theory the King Arthur whole wheat should be the same and come from hard red also, but this that I bought at the village market was fresh ground there, so maybe a little better and not so processed? Could be a toss up but being a grain newb I don't know what's what. The pizza came out great and no one again was the wiser. I may be imagining this but the dough was more elastic and chewier which is good....but I could be imagining that. Anyway, nothing went to waste! :-)

So I feel a little more comfortable and more adventurous ready to try some more grains and recipes. Then my next endeavor or question will be if these home mills will produce as nice flour as I can buy from the village market. I have a friend with a similar mill to what we are looking at so she may shed some light for me.