Bread winner of a different kind…

Some of you may be aware that I did a lot of baking while Misti was pregnant with Jack. I learned a lot about bread, and I got to be a reasonable baker thanks to “The Bread Book” from Laurel’s Kitchen. It is a great resource.

Once Jack was born and mobile, it became pretty difficult to commit the time and effort into making bread that I had once enjoyed.

Misti’s recent foray into more traditional foods and “high brix” gardening has also meant that we have been reading some interesting material on traditional methods for treating grains.

Amongst the many options out there is Sue Gregg’s two stage process for baking grains. Now, I’ve got to say that Sue is onto something here. Soaking the flour in an acid mix makes a huge difference to the texture of the finished product, and according to the experts on traditional methods, all ancient cultures treated whole wheat with acid or some other fermentation method before trying to bake with it.

Having said that, I find Sue’s approach to the art of baking to be extremely fussy and unnecessarily complex. Its probably just a cultural difference, so I decided to use her methods for treating grains and return to something more familiar as far as actually doing anything with them is concerned.

A friend of ours gave us a bread machine the other week (G’day Ned) and I finally got around to pressing it into service.

By sheer fluke the very first loaf I produced was perfect. I had adapted a Laurel’s Kitchen recipe to Gregg’s method, shoved it in the machine, and there it was, a perfectly risen loaf of tasty fresh bread.


It was so good, that I proceeded to produce another for our dinner guests the next day. To make in time for dinner, I had to cut the pre-soaking time in half. The result was a less than stellar loaf of yeasty, firm bread. This is the all-too-familiar house-brick, which results when your loaf hasn’t risen properly before baking. Thankfully, it had risen some, so it wasn’t objectionable, but I know I can do better than that. Our gracious guests decided to try some, in spite of my protest. It turns out that one of our guests had grown up in a Steiner school and had baked bread in the third grade on Tuesdays. This none-too-stellar loaf held the wonderful taste of childhood for her. Needless to say, she went home with it, and I went back to the drawing board.

Gregg’s method recommends 24 hours soaking for whole wheat. The first loaf I produced was soaked for 12, and worked perfectly. The second was soaked for 6, and didn’t rise properly. I decided to do the full 24 hour soak on loaf number 3, to see what happens.

Well, it flopped folks!! I had never had a loaf do this before, but it rose too quickly, deflated to flat before it started baking, and came out concave, so that you could safely pour a pint of beer in the crater and you wouldn’t spill any. I had mistakenly doubled the acid in that loaf, so I tried a second, with the same result. The third loaf on a 24 hour soak ended up with an extra half-cup of flour kneaded into it just before the bake, and still came out flat and hard, though this time it was perfectly cylindrical.

So I went back to what had worked so well the first time. 12 hour soak, Laurel’s Kitchen recipe, perfect loaf!!

I extended the next loaf to 16 hours soaking, and the result was a loaf which began to deflate just after baking had started, which means its still high and round on the top, but nowhere near as high as a properly risen loaf.

So, I have decided to settle for the one that works best,

I’ll do a full recipe in another post, so that, if you want to send it on to others, they don’t have to read all this twaddle to get to the good bit!!

Oh, for the record, this comes out at about $1.00 per loaf. It is not only the best tasting whole grain bread you can get without paying big bucks at a boutique bread-shop, its also a lot cheaper, and possibly more nutritious (if what they say about the soaking is correct) than anything you can buy anywhere.