Wheat Montana
Building bread with Wheat Montana Flour starts off like most other times I build bread. Which is never. For this product review though, my wife and I have decided to make bread from scratch. For the first time. Here is a little background video on the product we now stock at North 40 Outfitters. Check out this video titled "From our farm to your table". Really neat piece. Gives a good idea of why North 40 Outfitters stocks this stuff now it's one of the best local brands you can buy.
Anyways. Back to my kitchen which looks like it exploded, or like some giant, bandy-faced raccoon's been in here trying to find the peanut butter. Our three year old won't come in as per usual instead he stands at the door with his eyebrows drawn down very seriously concerned for his flour-coated, red-faced parents. He has a spatula gripped liked a sword and holds it between himself and the kitchen, "Monsters in derr," he says to my brother's little boy.
Back to building bread with Wheat Montana: all the recipes online are the same. Nothing changes about that, steps 1-20 (or however many there actually were) are the same. It's when we look at the label that things start to shift. The Wheat Montana flour is non-GMO, unbleached, unbromated and packed with protein, something my wife and I discovered after we had our hands in the stuff. Wheat Montana is almost treble, triple, three times (!) the protein count of other "plastic" breads. That's good, too, because my son is a jelly sandwich addict right now any way I can get more protein into his diet's a good thing. I'd even feed him grasshoppers if he'd eat them (though we tried that in Thailand and he wasn't up for it). With Wheat Montana, that's taken care of two slices is almost 10 grams of protein. 1/3 of what he needs for the day. That's if we ever get this bread built.
It took almost as long as it did to cut down, limb and stack this entire tree in Monarch.
It took Kristy and I about 4 pounds of the 5 pound bag to get the dough to the right consistency (as judged by my brother, farrier AND baker apparently). So after about 4 hours and a totaled kitchen, we got the bread in the oven. I just moved to Great Falls, so I had no idea you can go and meet the owner of the store here in town. He actually sees his customers everyday (my brother has been buying Wheat Montana for years and is familiar and tells me this like it's normal).
Watch my brother build a horse shoe here.
The bread we made came out- well- for a first time attempt at baking it was- burnt and mashed and not very pretty. But I figured this when I was at North 40 Outfitters buying the stuff, so I stopped by the Wheat Montana store and picked up a loaf already made. Needless to say Rani enjoyed the professional grade bread. We also stock Wheat Montana Pancake Mix and Wheat Montana Oatmeal at North 40 Outfitters both easier to put together than bread for those, like me, who are bakeless.
If you guys have any suggestions on how to get your bread to be perfect, please comment below. Send me your good recipes. Maybe even a homemade pizza crust recipe? Anything. I am lost with bread-baking. Any tips would go a long, long way to helping me figure it out. Or maybe stories of the first time you guys tried to make bread. That would assuage my ego a little. Plus probably be pretty funny. Either one.
