Eating Healthier in Today's World

ADDING MORE CEREAL TO YOUR BREAD

 I am continuing on our theme of adding different types of grains to our breads to make them more hearty and give them a different flavour.  Our last post talked about the more common grains to add to your breads like wheat, oats and barley so I thought we would discuss the more uncommon grains in this post.

Corn: Nearly everybody likes the sweet flavour of corn and its sunny colour.  In yeasted bread, corn poses unique problems and takes a little extra care to achieve a light loaf.  The most cornmeal you can just plunk into a normal whole wheat bread recipe is about 1/2 cup, substituted for that much wheat flour.  The bread may be a little dense, but it should be tasty.  It is much better to cook the corn first, and then add it to a well-kneaded dough made with finely ground high gluten wheat flour.  Even then, corn softens the wheat gluten and you may begin to think you will have to pour the dough into the pan--but if you follow the method in our ANADAMA BREAD HERE,  you can hav light, delicious bread in a very corny mood.

Generally choose cornmeal that is as coarsely ground as possible.  Your loaves will be lighter and the corn will show up better.  Cook the cornmeal before you add it to the kneaded dough, using as little water as possible.  If your recipe calls for oil, stir it into the cooled corn mush before adding it to the dough. 

A final word on corn:  once ground, it turns rancid rapidly.  This is a phenonmenon of recent years, a side effect of breeding corn for very high yield crops.  Maybe in the near future breeders will be able to correct the problem, but in the meantime virtually all cornmeal--degermed or not--and other corn products that are sold commercially are a little rancid, a little bitter.  Cornmeal that is really fresh--homeground, most likely, and stored in the refrigerator for less than five days--is sweet, sweet, sweet, and astonishing difference no one can fail to celebrate.  I like to mill my own cornmeal on the coarsest setting on the Nutrimill or in our Family Grain Mill.  Both popcorn and regular dry corn will turn into cornmeal easily.

Millet:  Millet sold for human consumption is hulled, and its tiny spheres are unusually clean.  It can be added just as is to bread dough, and will give crunch (but not tooth-breaking crunch) and a pretty dotted-swiss look to the slice.   I have also found that it adds a lot more moisture to the bread so it won't dry out as fast.  The flavour is very subtle, but for visual and textural effect, one-fourth cup of milled per loaf makes a good show.  To bring out its delicate flavour, rinse the grain and heat it dry (stirring all the while) in a big heavy pan until it just begins to brown. 

For less crunch, cook the millet in water.  You can add a cup a loaf or more; if the grain is well cooked you won't see it in the slice.  The loaf will very likely be a little heavy, but it will be moist and will have millet's sunshiny warmth of flavour.  For a very good millet bread, add cooked millet as part of the water measure in a plain light bread recipe.

Buckwheat Groats:  Kasha, as the Russians call it, or whole groats have every advantage in breadmaking over the flour ground from them.  The flour is heavy, and even a little bit makes the bread grayish and dense.  The groats, however, properly prepared, can flavour the loaf without weighing it down.

To start with, make sure you are using the broken buckwheat which is called groats and not the whole black coloured whole buckwheat.  Rinse the grain and heat and stir in a heavy pan until lightly toasted and fragrant.  Mixing a beaten egg into a cup of groats before toasting is traditional and does help to keep the grains whole and separate; if you don't have a non-stick pan, a little oil helps prevent sticking.  After toasting, you can either cool the groats and add them as is to the dry ingredients for the recipe, or knead them in later.  Or you can soften them a little and instead of white sparkling crunchies in the slice, you will have soft taupe nubbets.  To soften, pour boiling water over the hot toasted grain.  Use water to equal only HALF the measure of the groats; stir it in, and cover tightly until the water is absorbed and the grain is cool.  If you are tempted to use leftover kasha (cooked groats, that is)  or cook the grain in the amount of water for normal eating, it will turn mushy and disappear in the dough.  This does not make for light bread.  Raisins and sunflower seeds are good with buckwheat. 

Rice:  It is sometimes suggested that leftover rice (brown rice, of course)  be added to wheat dough.  Add one cup to a plain, light loaf's worth of dough, and you will have a chewy, rather flat-tasting bread with rice grains showing throughout.  A more interesting approach is to use rice in one of the "naturally fermented" breads.  Their fuller flavour and greater density accomodates rics's subtlety very well. 

Rye and Triticale:  Either of these is good to use like wheat, cracked or whole , as described in the last posting.  Both are also useful ground into flour.

Soy Grits:  Soy grits--like the largest crack possible--make a very successful cracked "grain" in bread, with a nutritional plus.  Be sure to precook them, even the toasted ones, for 15 min. or more in a equal quantitiy of boiling water; otherwise, they can rip up your dough.  About 1/3 cup of cooked grits per loaf is a reasonable amount.  For the best flavour, sweeter and not so beany, choose untoasted grits.

MIxed Grain Cereals in Bread:  As many of you know we carry a Multimix grain of 9 grains (no wheat) that we make up at the time of yearly grain order in the fall.  I recomment two ways of using it.  Either crack up 1 to 2 cups (I use the Bosch Blender for 10 sec.) and then throw it in the hot water for your bread and let it sit there while you are assembling the rest of the ingredients and make you bread as you would normally.  The second method of using Multimix is to mill 1 to 2 cups in your Nutrimill Grain Mill, along with 9 cups of wheat and then make the bread with that flour.  You will get a lighter loaf with the first method, but if you don't want a lot of crunchy bits use the second method.

There is a large natural foods firm that sells a nine-grain bread: for commercially produced loaf, it is excellent.  I thought I would try to duplicate it with my own version.  For starters, I tried just adding leftover cooked cereal (commercially purchased)  to dough, as I have done successful with just oatmeal--but what a disaster!  The cereal contains wheat, rye, barley, triticale, corn, oats, millet, flax and soy grits--an innocent list, but somewhere in there was dynamite for the dough.  Why do I tell you this?  I think it is by way of saying that someone else's mix of grains may not be just what you would want, and there are more reliable ways of coming up with a good mixed-grain bread than adding a cereal. 

One simple and effective way is just to add half a cup of sprouted grains or the same amount of whole or coarsely cracked grains (steamed chewy-tender, drained and cooled) to the well-kneaded, elastic dough for any normal, high-rising whole wheat loaf.  There will be flavour and nubby aplenty, and the bread will look pretty too.

Our next post will focus on using NON-WHEAT FLOUR in your breads