Whole Food Breakfasts

On mornings when I'm running late, I usually end up dashing out the door with an apple or clementine and a Ziplock bag full of milk+honey brand granola.  But sometimes, nothing will do but a big, hearty plate full of meat and eggs.

Like so:

Or like so:

I love fresh-baked bread, especially in the morning, but I've been really wrestling with what to do about white flour.  Fact: all-purpose white flour is only available enriched with all sorts of things my great grandmother wouldn't approve of, like thiamin.  But fact: white flour absorbs moisture differently than its heartier cousin whole wheat flour.  If you try to replace the white flour in a recipe with whole wheat flour (even "white" whole wheat flour) something very odd can happen, like the following:

My experimentation with the Trader Joe "white" whole wheat flour resulted in two very strange loaves. The dough was incredibly tight -- nearly impossible to knead -- and they barely rose at all while baking, which gave them this heavy, dense texture best analogized (as Amy put it) to fudge.

I'm going to keep working on the right mix of ingredients to make this work, when I get a spare hour to study the chapter on bread in "On Food and Cooking".  Stay tuned.