wet-grinding whole grains in a blender
Has anyone else tried using a blender to grind water and soaked whole grains into a batter that, with some flour, becomes dough? I don't have a mill, so I gave it a shot using wheat berries. My blender isn't the expensive kind, so it made an uneven, course grind. I didn't really know how much of it was fine enough to make the dough stiffer, so I had to hydrate the dough by feel. The resulting bread has a sweet flavor I haven't tasted in bread made with whole wheat flour. I guess it's basically a porridge bread with somewhat finer particles of porridge. Even though it doesn't quite work the way I had hoped, I like the results and I'll be trying it again with different grains. I'm curious if someone with a professional blender has tried this, even though if you have one, you can probably just use it to mill the grain without water.
I should've taken a photo of the wheat berry slurry, but here's the bread:
I recently made a sprouted pulp bread, with sprouted Kamut berries that I ground wet in my food processor. I tried milling them with the steel burrs in the Wondermill Jr. but that was taking way too long and was a pain in the butt to clean up after. The food processor did a pretty good job. It was, as you say, a coarse gummy mess (I did the wet berries without adding more water), but baked up into a lovely bread. The recipe was from Reinhart's "Bread Revolution" (Sprouted Emmer Pulp Power Bread, made with sprouted Kamut pulp instead). Very nice bread.
Alton Brown did a show about tortillas where he first nixtamalized the corn, rinsed and de-hulled the kernels and ground then into masa in food processor. I don't see why you couldn't use the food processor to do the same thing to soaked wheat berries. By the way, that loaf looks delicious.
Great looking bread! I will have to try that some time.
Hi,
What a beautiful loaf!
I soak brown rice and then grind it with water so that the Vita Mixer can whirl it easily.
No need to measure the water (double?). Then I pour it into a jar and let the water separate. I pour out the excess water each day for about 2-3 days.
It works well for Chinese rice dumplings (sweet or salty) in various recipes but it is a much wetter dough than for bread.
I would add some white flour until the dough is the right consistency for bread.
Add leavens and you can proceed with baking a loaf.
The VitaMixer gives a very fine grind if there is enough water.
Interesting. The rice particles sink and you can pour off the top. I'll try that