Eating Healthier in Today's World

SPROUTS AND SPUDS

Natural Dough Conditoners--In our search for ways to make the home baker's job easier, Ilooked for some natural equivalents for the dozens of chemicals bakers use, figuring that if professionals resort to such "aids", surely there must be a few innocent additives that would bge helpful in the home kitchen.  A lot of things have been tried that I have read about, including ginger, garlic, crushed Vitamin C tablets, slippery elm bark, and rose hip tea.  None of them made much difference so far as I could tell, though you can produce some pretty flavourful loaves.  Actually even many of the commercial additives don't have much effect when used with whole wheat flour especially the fresh ground flour.

In the researching attempts, some of the most interesting information I came across was in old books written for bakers--books published around 1920, when the local bakery still might or might not have a kneading machine.  For example, one book suggested that adding a tiny amount of wheat germ to your white flour had an improving effect on the dough.  The suggested was not too different from the amount that occurs naturally in whole wheat flour.  The one additive that all the books praised was potatoes, and of the things you can add to bread, I too like potatoes best.  Potato bread recipes, and information about using potatoes will be in following blogs. 

The additive you most often find listed on the side of white flour sacks is malted barley flour.  It is incorporated when the flour has been found to be deficient in diastatic enzymes.  Whole wheat flour (especially fresh home-ground) is seldom supplemented in this way.  If you would like to use dimalt (that is, diastatic malt flour) in your bread for sweetness, and you don't like the fancy jprices they charge for it in the health food stores, you can make your own;  it is simple to do!

Some other ingredients that are an integral part of many recipes --soy flour, for example or milk products--do conditon and improve the dough as well.  We have sold our own DOUGH ENHANCER, which has no chemicals and is made of whey, lecithin (soy derivative) and Vitamin C. , for years and love the moist high loaves that are produced with our fresh whole wheat flour.  The bread lasts longer in the freezer without drying out and the texture is light and moist. 

Or course the Great Granddaddy of all dough conditoners and a high tech one at that, is yeast.  But aside from lively yeast, the two essentials for light bread are basic:  fresh high-gluten flour and plenty of kneading.  That is where our Bosch Universal Bread Makers come into the picture.

Our next Blogs will be about Sprouting and Malting and making Spouted wheat breads.