Oatmeal Homemade Bread Recipe

So you are wondering if oatmeal homemade bread is healthier than store-bought? Oh yes baby, it is. And it’s so easy to make! This homemade bread recipe took me 2 hours, but most of that was waiting for it to get nice and fluffy.

Oatmeal Homemade Bread Recipe

Ok, so I just have to say that this oatmeal homemade bread recipe was SO very easy to make. You will see in the photos below the very few steps it took to make it. I think it was very easy for me because I have a KitchenAid Mixer that I use to knead the dough and that takes all of five minutes when I can put away the ingredients used to make the bread.

Why Homemade Bread Is Healthier

It’s so worth it to make your own homemade oatmeal bread. Do you ever look at the ingredients on your loaf of bread and see the following: Bromated. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Azodicarbonamide, Mono & Di-glycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate (SSL), and Diacetyl Esters of Tartaric Acid (DATEM), and Lecithin? Yikes! These ingredients are not good people! They are just preservatives to keep the bread moist or they are additives to sweeten the bread or adjust the taste in some way.

So what are your options when you need to buy bread? Obviously not everyone has the time to make their own homemade bread. I hardly have the time but have found a really great and easy recipe that allows me to do so. You can thank me later when your family devours the first batch in one day. The night I made this bread the first time, my kids ate half the loaf before bed with just butter on it.

Sometimes you can find organic bread on sale in the grocery store and beats making your own bread if you don’t have time. Barowsky’s bread has minimal ingredients and is located in New England. Most of the time, however, organic bread is more than $5 for one small loaf! And it doesn’t even last very long. But the reason why cheaper bread lasts so long is because there are such gross ingredients in them. In the post 5 Reasons Why Homemade Bread is Better I talk about why homemade bread is healthier. Below is a list of common chemicals in commercial bread. Caution: may cause you to become dizzy and lose your balance.

Common Chemicals in Commercial Bread

• Bromate (or Potassium Bromate) is a flour “improver” that strengthens dough and allows for greater oven spring and higher rising in the oven. if too much is used, or the bread is not baked long enough or at a high enough temperature, then a residual amount will remain, which is known to cause cancer.
• High Fructose Corn Syrup is a man-made sweetener that doesn’t break down in the body the same way regular sugar does. Often it settles on our waistlines and causes cravings for more, which creates weight gain. It’s a vicious cycle.
• Azodicarbonamide is a bleaching agent. Besides making the bread whiter by reacting with cartonene in the flour, it is an orange, odorless, powder. Ew.
• Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Monoglycerides (DATEM) is another dough conditioner used to improve volume and uniformity. It is considered safe by the FDA, but a study in 2002, on rats, it showed “heart muscle fibrosis and adrenal overgrowth”.
• Mono & Di-glycerides are partially hydrogenated oils. If you haven’t heard of this I dare say you’ve been living under a rock.
• Lecithin is obtained from soy, which means genetically modified plants. Ugh.

If you can’t find bread with ingredients you can pronounce, try this recipe below. It’s so easy, I promise.

Homemade Oatmeal Bread Recipe

So after you add your ingredients to your bowl – whether you are using your hands, a KitchenAid Mixer or a bread machine, you still want to put the liquids on the bottom and the dry ingredients on top. Then make a little well in the flour for the yeast – you don’t want it to land into the water until you are mixing.

Once the dough is kneaded, just transfer it to a lightly-oiled bowl and cover with a few towels and keep away from a draft for about 1 hour. Perfect time to go get the kids from the bus!

After an hour, take the dough and turn it onto an oiled surface and shape it into a loaf. This shouldn’t take more than 1-2 seconds because at this point the dough is very pliable. Then place it into a pan – please excuse the aluminum foil on my bread pan. I desperately need a new one. Like this one here. I tried to use a silicone bread pan and my bread looked obese. Seriously. It still tasted awesome though!

I let the bread sit in the bread pan and simply placed a plastic container over it that actually fit quite perfectly over the bread pan, just to allow the bread room to rise. You just need to use something that won’t stick to the top of the bread as it rises or it WILL deflate when you take it off!

At this point you just put the bread in the oven for 30 minutes. Be prepared for a lot of whining and “can I have bread” until you take the bread out and it cools off. All of this time is very exciting but also frustrating for very excited kids!

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