Bread Experiment #12

You might go looking for the other experiments, but you won't find them on this blog... I'm only publishing the ones that I LOVE and will continue to use. (Sorry, no photos - we ate the bread too fast!)


So, here it is, the meat and potatoes of the bread recipe: (If you don't have my basic bread recipe yet you can sign up to get it here. It is the one for the Bosch Universal mixer.)
First, I leave the basics alone - the water, oil, honey, salt, yeast and dough enhancer amounts have not changed.
What I have played with are the flour amounts and what I have been using for my flour. For example, I use roughly 16 cups of flour. I'm not sure how accurate that is anymore, because I always lose count and just add flour as needed until my bread is barely no longer sticky.
So, I put in the hot water, yeast, dough enhancer, oil and honey. Then I add a cup of mashed potato flakes (potato pearls do NOT work, unless you pulverize the pearls first). Next, I put in between one and two cups of ground flaxseed (I prefer this golden flaxseed), AND lately, I've been adding a 10-grain cereal mix. It is a course grind whole grain cereal and I just throw it in. I haven't been letting it sit and soak much, but I understand you can let it sit up to 5 or so minutes. I've also enjoyed adding 1/4 cup millet. It seems to be a lot of millet, so I may tone it down a little to 1/8 cup. (Still experimenting with that one.)
And finally, I prefer to use 3 different kinds of flour - usually spelt, hard white and hard red whole wheat flours. The flour mix makes a tastier loaf, I think. (Don't forget to add the salt.)

The result? Tasty, healthy, WHOLE GRAIN bread that is light enough that you don't feel like you are eating a brick and has enough substance to know you have eaten something! Bread doesn't last long at my house.

This last week, I've made 3 batches of bread (5-6 loaves per batch), mostly for Christmas presents for some friends and neighbors and have had rave reviews about my experiments. One neighbor was so excited she was going to hide it all for herself because my bread is SO YUMMY and so AMAZING! (Actually, I know of at least two people who hid it to eat the loaf by themselves.)   Makes me happy to think I am helping them have a little extra joy in their lives.

Here's to some more happy experimenting!

Whole Wheat Pizza and Breadsticks

Aren't these cute?!

My three year old came up with the idea to use the dinosaur sandwich cutter on the breadsticks. Isn't he brilliant? We used our pizza dough recipe to make whole wheat and spelt pizza (do you need that recipe?). We used half of the dough to make breadsticks and half to make a pizza. (by the way - the one with the "well-done" head, was a little thin on the dough. The rest of the dinosaurs were thicker dough.)

Note- I have a super-picky eater at my house. This child likes pizza, but only likes tomato sauce on the pizza. I wondered what he would think of these dinosaur shapes. I even made some and baked the tomato sauce on top. 

They were such a hit, and he ate them all up so fast that I only got pictures of the ones that didn't have baked on tomato sauce. I only made four or five tomato sauce dinosaurs, so when he wanted more, we just threw some tomato sauce on top of the dinosaurs and he ate a few more! Hooray for fun food!

Here are the breadsticks that I made - with a layer of cheese on top. YUMM!

And just for fun - the pizza. I'm not a supreme pizza kind of girl, so this is how I like my pizza.

Flour in Food Storage & Notes on Hard Red Wheat

Question of the day:  (I haven't done this in a while. I'm glad for the opportunity.)

I have just started my food storage in earnest and... in my eagerness to begin my storage, I went to Costco and bought 300 lbs. of flour. I have come to realize that is A LOT of flour, and I am skeptical that I will go through it before it spoils. I have decided storing flour is probably not the best option.

I have a ton of red wheat in storage, but I have been told that only having red wheat in bread is bad for digestion, and therefore having 1/2 red wheat and 1/2 flour is best. Because I do not wish to store flour as stated above, I am wondering if I can store white wheat to replace the flour and therefore avoid the digestion problems?

I bake all of my own bread, and that is primarily what the wheat in storage would be used for.

Do you have any other suggestions about storing wheat that would help me in my food storage voyage? Any information you can give me would be greatly appreciated!

My Answer: 

Great questions. Well, first of all, hard red wheat is not necessarily BAD for digestion. It depends on the person and their individual digestive system. Though, Hard red wheat is typically harder to digest than others.

I used to store a lot of flour in my food storage. I now only store about 150 lbs for my laziness (when I don't have time to grind flour or energy and just need a quick cup for some cookies or something) and then store several types of grains. As a matter of taste, I do not love to use only hard red wheat. It is too much "heavy" whole wheat flavor and texture for me. I do not enjoy hard red wheat by itself. I do enjoy using hard red wheat in portions, though. I store hard red wheat, hard white wheat, spelt and bread flour. I use the flour, like I said, when I'm being lazy or my kids want to bake something. (At least for now.) Otherwise, I'll grind my own flour from the red, white wheat and spelt - usually in equal portion and use that. The flavor is so much better when I mix my grains. Even if you use 1/2 red wheat and 1/2 flour (so you can use up some of that flour faster than you normally would if you ground all of your own flour for your bread), your bread would be much better than just using whole red wheat and you shouldn't experience such drastic digestive problems.

As a matter of interest, hard white wheat is great in breads and will give your bread a sweeter flavor. Spelt has a bit of a nutty taste to it. So, mixing all of these grains together and storing them for such use is my preferred method.

Does that help?

p.s. Plastic Buckets (5-6 gallons) or large rubbermaid or metal garbage cans are a great way to store your grains (I don't take mine out of the original packaging, though you could) and/or flour. It helps keep the rodents out, helps maintain dryness (supposing things flood sometimes) and basically keeps the air and sunlight off of your food storage.

Until later.

Rexburg Farmer's Market starts April 30

So, if you've been looking forward to new posts lately, I'm sorry to disappoint... I realized the Rexburg Farmer's Market starts on April 30 and I've been racing to have something ready to sell.

I've been working on different recipes and trying to perfect them - like Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies and my new Whole Wheat Potato Bread. (Boy, they are good once I get the recipe right.) So, I hope your mouth is watering and my efforts are worth it and I have some to sell to our Farmers Market fans on April 30 (from 4-8 pm in the parking lot just south of the Rexburg Tabernacle).

Meanwhile - I'll get some new posts together and let you know I'm still here.

(And hey, if you live close, ask me about taste testing some of my trials - I need a few more guinea pig critics!)

Shopping for Health

The other day I was grocery shopping and remembered I wanted to buy some more cornmeal. (My friend gave me this great homemade cornbread recipe!) I haven't bought very much cornmeal in my life, so I was reading the labels to see what the difference was. Most of the cornmeal I found said something like bran and germ have been removed.

WHAT?!?!

Really?

I suppose most foods do have the germ and bran removed from them so they can sit on the shelf longer - but didn't anyone include the germ and bran in their cornmeal? I know that food is healthier for you if you have germ and bran included - it is the actual WHOLE grain form of the food. Whole grains are good for your body, especially when you include the germ and bran in the mix.

I searched and searched and ended up just grabbing one. They all read about the same.

So, I walked down the baking aisle a little more and happened upon a section of Bob's Red Mill packages. Well, lo and behold, Bob had a fine ground cornmeal that had the germ and bran milled with it and was not removed! I was so happy!!

Bob's Red Mill Corn Meal won. I went and put the other cornmeal back and bought Bob's. And you know, the price wasn't much different for the whole cornmeal than for the stripped cornmeal.

I'll go for health. Thanks, Bob.