My 2015 baking challenge

2015's Baking Challenge: 

50 lbs. of Whole Wheat flour

Wait, what?

That's right, in the year 2015 I've challenged myself to up my baking game. And to do that I'll be trying to bake through 50 lbs. of whole wheat flour. After doing some research I found out whole wheat flour has a shelf life of about 6 months if you throw it in a freezer. I'm starting out with a 25 lbs bag of whole wheat flour and I'll storing that in our chest freezer. If the first 6 months goes well then I know I'm on track to cook through all 50 lbs by the end of the year.

If I fail then I will have to commit ritual seppuku with jagged, pointy end of a month old stale baguette. If I succeed then good for me, maybe I'll bake myself an epic cookie.

Why?

The short answer is that I'm possibly a crazy person who's been allowed near knives and open flame. The more serious answer is longer. I came into the hobby of baking through one of my other great culinary loves, beer. From what I've seen out on the great world wide intarwebs I'm not the only person to make this leap. Some of us are just fermentation focused I guess.

Also, bread combines my love of cooking in general with my love of science and experimentation. Also also, like my start in beer, there came a day I was eating some particularly awful store bought bread and thought, "I can make something better than this." And away we went.

How much experience do you have?

Not that much, the aforementioned amateur homebrewing experience lead me into fermenting Kombucha tea at home, which lead me to try my hand at making sourdough bread. Fermentation city, population: this guy. I've been making and experimenting with mostly sourdough rolls and breads for about a year coming into this.

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EQUIPMENT (Where does he get those wonderful toys?):

25 lbs bag of Whole Wheat Flour
on my kitchen table

• 25 lbs. of whole wheat flour: Thanks to Great River Organic Milling Company for putting an afforably priced bag of whole wheat flour on Amazon. Thanks to Amazon for making it a prime item so it was at my door in 2 days. No turning back now.
• Two hands: I love all of my kitchen (there's a lot of love going on here) but your first and most important instrument is your hands. Even if you have some of the gadgets listed below, try to mix up a few batches of whatever you're baking by hand first. Is it messy? Yup. Will it give you a feel for you dough? Double yup. It's important to get a good feel for your dough. When it's too wet, too dry, whether it needs more kneading, or if it's just right. It'll help you identify all of those conditions visually when you move on to using a mixer.
• A good set of tablespoon/teaspoon measuring spoons: Not everyone has a digital scale starting out baking. That's ok. Some home bakers only measure by volume. My first year and a half only measured by volume and it worked fine. I decided when I was going into this challenge that I wanted to get more accurate hence the switch over to a scale. Also if we're being honest, measuring ingredients and mixing them up makes me feel a bit like a mad scientist. FOR SCIENCE!
• A good set of measuring cups: See last entry

  

  Scale for measuring by weight
  and SCIENCE!

• EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale: When I was doing my research coming into this challenge, the majority of the bread recipes I was reading either exclusively listed out their ingredients by weight or listed them out by both weight and volume. Professional bread makers have to be a bit more precise since they could be making hundreds of loaves at a time and the margin of error is smaller. Since we're home baking, use whatever is available/makes sense to you.
• KitchenAid 325 Watt 5 Quart mixer: My wonderful wife supports all of my endeavors, as crazy as most of them are. Shortly after my bag of flour arrived my wife surprised me with this mixer. She custom decorated it with flower and hummingbird decals in honor of my grandmother who had a beautiful flower garden and several hummingbird feeders. Whenever I think of baking I think of all the amazing breads and cookies she used to bake for us grandchildren growing up. 

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FLOUR TOTAL (The bottom line):

I'm trying to keep a running estimate of how much flour we use and how much is left. Check for this number at the bottom of every baking project post I put up. 

25 pounds which is a whopping 11,340 grams. Let's get to baking.