I have been buying bulk hard red winter wheat berries and sprouting them.  I then dry them in a dehydrator and mill them into flour.  I am going to attempt my first sourdough bread with this flour.  I would like to figure out the percent protein in the flour I have.  Is there a way to do this at home without sending it to a lab? 

Thanks,

Brandon

I have a bread baking blog where I posted some information about sprouting wheat berries at home, then dehyrdating them and grinding them to bake bread.  I posted a topic called WHY SPROUTED WHEAT?

http://valeriejaquith.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-sprouted-flour.html#comments

Someone posted a comment to my topic saying that there was a good chance that my berries where in fact DROWNED and not sprouted!  Here is an excerpt from that posted comment:  "...and of utmost importance, they conduct the falling number test to determine that the grain has been sprouted and not drown...all steps that cannot be done in a home operation. Based on convention wisdom about how to sprout grains, most of the grain is being drown and not sprouted"

I conducted a test to see how many of my sprouts had actually sprouted and to see if any of the berries did not sprout, indicating that they are drowned I suppose.  I could only find a few berries that may not have sprouted after 24 hours of sprouting following a 10 hour soak.  Here is the photo of the sprouts:

I plan on waiting another 24 hours to see if the berries that are questionable did develop a full blown sprout.

Can anyone provide me with some more information on this topic?   

Hello everyone,

If you bake with sprouted flour and have some tricks to share, I would greatly appreciate it.  I made my first bread with sprouted flour today, Multigrain Struan from Reinhardt's Whole Grain Baking.  It is a recipe that uses biga and a soaker, and proceeds to combine the two with other ingredients (flour, yeast, honey, oil, salt) during the final dough mixing.  then bulk fermentation, dividing the dough and final rising.  The loaves start out in 425F oven with normal steam, but once the loaves are placed there, the temperature is lowered to 350F.  Loaves bake about 40 min and are rotated half-way through the bake.  I followed the recipe and baked on quarry tiles.  I made two loaves (one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) with organic stone-ground whole wheat and two with organic sprouted (also one batard in La Cloche and one loaf in a loaf pan) for comparison. 

Sprouted flour loaves of either shape did not rise much in the oven, and the scored area sort of sank in.  Stone-ground flour loaves of both shapes had great oven spring and the scoring worked out fine as well.  Now, the taste...  Sprouted loaves were chewy and a bit "wet" to the taste, a bit sweeter than the stone-ground ones, with a more pronounced nutty flavor.  Yummy and delicous is the only word to describe them!  Now if I could only make them more visually attractive.  So, if you have secrets to share, I am eager to learn! Thank you so much in advance.

Kroha

I picked up a kilo of sprouted universal (all purpose; AP) wheat flour today! Wow! ...in a normal supermarket! I'm so excited!  Why?  As I get older, I eat less, I want more nutrition from my food ingredients, sprouted flour could be an option.  Being curious, I'm investigating.

Let me back up a little.  I live just outside of Linz, Austria.  Our flour normally comes in kilo size paper bags and there are several brands to choose from.  One popular brand is Fini's Feinstes  (or Fini's Finest).   I had noticed there was a "New" red label in the corner.  I grabbed my w700 bread flour and some whole spelt flour and started rolling the packages over looking for something more than w480 which is AP.  Proteins are listed and what is this new one?  With Keimkraft..... keimkraft... sprouts!  I grabbed a package and hurried home to investigate.  Here is the site in English.  I have never seen sprouted flour here before other than malt.

There are pictures of the sprouts at the site, 10 of them and they make up 10% of the flour.  That was a little bit of a let down, I was hoping for 100% sprouted flour.  Barley is not included which is the known "malt" grain.

So now I'm wondering...why only 10%?  Enzyme action?  Dan mentions 5% malt maximum..... (my brain gears are turning remembering malt sprouts have long tails).  In my web searches I ran into interesting definitions, sprouts vs germination.  The words are often used interchangeably but germination happens first and then the sprout appears and grows.  What I'm trying to understand is .... as the sprout gets longer or older with time, do the enzymes get stronger and concentrated?  Are freshly germinated seeds milder but still as nutritious as older sprouts?  The sprouts are stopped at a particular stage, dried, and milled into flour.  Which stage?  (If I were to germinate my own and stop the process to dry them, when is the best time to catch the sprouts before they interfere with my dough?)

Will the flour behave itself when I make bread?   Protein is 11.9   not bad...