Bread – What size bowl for bread

If you are having trouble with honey-wheat bread sticking in your cast iron pan, there are several things worth trying:

• Make sure the pan is well seasoned. There should be a smooth, continuously black surface over the entire food contact area of the pan.

• Spray the pan with oil before adding the bread. This may or may not work but is probably worth a try.

• Do not add the loaf directly to the cast iron pan. Put it in on a parchment sheet, so that it is not in direct contact with the oven. You will have to peel off the parchment afterwards, but it should reduce sticking.

  In fact, in some versions of no-knead bread, this is the recommended method until the loaf is well set, then you remove the parchment for the latter part of the baking to facilitate bottom crust development.

Honey-wheat breads are going to be inherently more sticky than a pure white bread, especially because of the sugar, and because the whole wheat bran in the loaf tends to cut the gluten strands, making it hard to get a tightly stretched gluten network on the outside of your loaf, which is one of the things that makes it less likely to stick.

There are some previous questions with good answers like this one, or this that go into much more detail than I'm about to.

You said your bread didn't rise with the first rise, if you don't have a first rise you can't go onto the next step. If your yeast was old, or the temperature was cold in your kitchen or you used cold water in the dough, or the yeast came in contact with salt then its action could have been slowed down drastically and it would take much longer to get a rise. I've had a first rise take up to 4 hours in the past because of these factors. The times given in recipes are just guidelines, you have to be result-driven. Active dry yeast also takes longer than quick yeast to activate. When using active dry instead of quick yeast you would get better results by mixing it with the water before mixing in. I'd recommend using quick yeast as it's milled into smaller grains and you can mix it directly into the flour.

Of course your yeast may have simply been dead, or killed by salt or heat. Get some good fresh yeast and store it in the fridge to keep it fresh long-term.

Also, using all whole wheat flour isn't going to produce anything like a baguette. Whole wheat flour is very heavy compared to white flour and will take longer to rise. A half and half mix would work better. I'd recommend sticking to the recipe first, then gradually modifying it over time until you get your desired result.