Baking Bread at Home in India

A few months back I tried baking whole wheat bread at home. I have an oven, flour is available in the market, can buy yeast, so why not? And I got my bread - well, more like a brick.

Many days have passed and today I can get a reasonably nice bread out of my oven. I tried to get inputs from experts, no one to help. I browsed the internet, got a lot of information - but not applicable to us in India. For example, after making the dough,it should be kept in a warm place to rise - but the warm place in India is more like an air conditioned room typically about 80 deg F, or about 28 deg C, the reference to "warm place" being more applicable to those cold weather countries! So after many trials - for example - "punch the dough" went through at least 20 different iterations - I was able to get my bread with 70% whole wheat flour, with a final volume of about two and a half time of the base dough volume, which can be made into a good toast almost like the one with a good quality of white bread...

I hope to be able to share some of my experiences here as we go on.. breads, cakes... then possibly to other items too. So, watch out for the posts in the days to come, and thanks, guys!! And maybe I will learn a couple of new things too.