Eating Healthier in Today's World

MAKING BREADS WITH CEREAL OR CRACKED GRAINS

When it comes to adding cereal grains to breads, there are two schools of thought.  On one hand is the crowd who will add nearly anything--certainly any leftover cereal--to bread dough: the motive either can be earnest thriftiness or sometimes it's a kind of unabashed bravado.  These people are fond of their inevitably hearty loaves, and even when some of their friends don't share their enthusiasm, it turns out all right because a bread that has a lot of cooked grain in it will not stale quickly.

In the second school, rather more button-down, are those who admire the featherlight commercial "honey-wheatberry" bread and long for a recipe that will enable them to make such loaves in their OWN KITCHENS: they want to reproduce the pale, airy, sweet, tender loaves, luscious with soft nuggets of REAL WHEAT strewn throughout.  Alas, careful reading of the fine print on the wrapper reveals that the first (the most plentiful) ingredient is white flour--cunningly called "Wheat" flour but not "Whole Wheat."  Very few home bakers would be able to replicate that bread with whole wheat flour (although we come pretty close when using our Bosch machines).

Whatever school you favour, and even if you are not ready to join either, I hope the information in this post will get you interested in including whole and cracked grains, and grains other than wheat in your breads. 

Wheat:  Here, I am talking about wheat that isn't ground into flour--about whole berries or kernels that have been cracked, and about bulgar wheat, a special kind of cracked wheat that is particularly good for baking.

Cracked Wheat:  You can make nubbly, pretty bread with ordinary cracked wheat, very easily with the Bosch machine, however by hand it requires a little more work.  The main problem with cracked wheat that you purchase at the store is it is usually too finely ground.  When you buy it, or if you grind it yourself, try to get a crack that is nearly half of a wheat berry--very large.  Most of what I have seen on the shelves is more of a wheat meal, and when added to the bread it does nothing more than make it heavy and crumbly.  If you mill your own, it is worth sifting out the small particles.  You can crack your own in our hand operated Family Grain Mills or in the blender of the Bosch Universal Plus machines. (jogged a couple of times so as not to make meal)

Bulgar Wheat:  This is a sort of cracked wheat that I like best for adding to bread.  I suggest to use the coarsest size.  It keeps it's shape, and is different enough in colour to show up against wheat dough.  Natural food stores often sell bulgar wheat in bulk, or you may find it on the supermarket shelf.

You can soften grain for using in your dough in several ways.  Probably the easiest is to rinse a cup of grain and stir in a cup of boiling water, letting it stand, covered, until the water is absorbed.  If you use more water, as you would if cooking the wheat for normal eating, it will be too fluffy and tender to keep it's shape in the dough. 

Wheat Berries:  If you sprout wheat for two or three days, it will make a good show in a whole wheat loaf.  Knead them, about half a cupful per loaf, into any bouncy plain bread dough.  Slightly less wonderful but plenty good are unsprouted whole berries cooked chewy-tender, kneaded into the dough in the same proportion.  ( I cook it like rice with a ratio of 2 to 1, water to wheat, for about 1/2 hour or so) 

Oats:  Oats give whole wheat a subtle sweetness and a little extra chew.  The flavour of oats blends well with wheat, making it a taste richer.  You can use rolled oats uncooked in bread but it won't be any lighter for their presence.  On the other hand, if you use porridge made from rolled oats to replace most of the liquid in the bread dough, the results is an exceptionally light and chewy-tender loaf.

Oat groats or steel cut oats (oat groats cut up) must be cooked.  Bread using their porridge makes a slightly heavier, moister loaf, but one with outstanding eating quality that keeps very well. 

For a very pretty crust on the dark breads especially, or on any bread with oats inside, coat the loaf with rolled oats after shaping the dough.  Either spread the oats on a table and rol the loaf in them, or just sprinkle them in the greased pan before you put the bread into it;  for the top, brush with milk or water and dust with the oats just before putting the bread in the oven to bake.  Hearth loaves can be baked on a rolled-oat-strewn baking sheet, but strew with a light hand:  to thick a layer will keep the bread from cooking on the bottom.

Barley:  Ordinary barley has tough, sharp hulls that adhere to tightly that the grain must be milled many times (pearled) to get them off;  the germ and the useful bran layers are lost in the milling, needless to say, along with the indigestible hull.  I wouldn't recommend using pearl barley.  A naturally hulless barley that we get with our grain order is good for this use.  Just make some porridge from it and use it in the bread the same way as the cooked oatmeal.

Our next post will talk about adding different types of grains to bread such as corn, millet, buckwheat, rice, rye, triticale and quinoa.