The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

sprouted wheat

Isand66's picture
Isand66

     As I mentioned in my previous post I recently purchased a Brod and Taylor proofer and I have been experimenting with it to see how it affects the sourness and overall bread.

For this latest bread I decided to let the starter ferment at 85 degrees inside the proofer for around 10 hours.  Probably could have cut the time down considerably in hindsight but it doesn't look like the extended time really hand any effect on the overall bread.

When I mixed the starter which had French style flour along with Durum flour along with the flour for the main dough I let it sit inside the proofer for 2 hours at 85 degrees while I did my normal stretch and folds at 15 minute intervals for a total of 3 S&F's.

I used one of the Ale's I purchased a few weeks ago called Hurricane Kitty in place of most of the water and since one of my apprentices insisted on helping on this particular bake I named it after him.

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The next day I took the dough out of the refrigerator and put it in the proofer at 80 degrees for 1.5 hours.  I shaped the loaves and let it proof again but at 85 degrees for around 1.5 hours before baking.

The final result was excellent.  A nice open crumb with not too thick of a crust. The onions really came through and the small amount of sprouted wheat really combined well with the French flour and Durum flour.  The crumb is very soft and it made a perfect sandwich bread for my pastrami.  I really like the way this one came out and will make this one again for sure.

 

Levain Directions

Mix all the levain ingredients together for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 7-8 hours or until the starter has doubled.  (Note: I used my proofer set at 86 degrees F.)  I usually do this the night before.

Either use in the main dough immediately or refrigerate for up to 1 day before using.

Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours, and Hurricane Kitty Ale together in your mixer or by hand until it just starts to come together, maybe about 1 minute.  Let it rest in your work bowl covered for 20-30 minutes.  While that is resting mix the onions in the water and let it rest.  Next add the salt, starter (cut into about 7-8 pieces), walnut oil, and rehydrated onions in water and mix on low for 4 minutes.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  After a total of 2 hours place your covered bowl in the refrigerator and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours.  (Note: I used my proofer set at 85 degrees).

When you are ready to bake remove the bowl from the refrigerator or proofer and let it set out at room temperature still covered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  (Note: I used the proofer set at 80 degrees).  Next remove the dough and shape as desired.  and place your dough into your proofing basket(s) and cover with a moist tea towel or plastic wrap sprayed with cooking spray.  The dough will take 1.5 to 2 hours depending on your room temperature.  (I let the dough proof in my proofer for 1.5 hours at 85 degrees).  Let the dough dictate when it is read to bake not the clock.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, score as desired and then add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.  I forgot to include the black sesame seeds I used on one of the loaves.  I simply spritzed the loaf with some water and then sprinkled the seeds on.

After 1 minute lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 35-50 minutes until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 205 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

 

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breaducation's picture
breaducation

My latest bake continues my recent obsession with sprouted grains in bread. I've been experimenting with them a lot lately and have found the flavor truly excellent. There is a nice sweetness to the sprouted grain and none of the bitterness that you find in whole wheat flour. Combine this with the great healthy benefits that come from sprouting grain and you have a great addition to many breads.

At first I tried playing around with sprouted wheat in country breads and had great results but it was time to step it up. My latest bake is an extremely tasty sprouted wheat sandwich bread. This loaf's flavor is unlike anything I've tasted when using pure whole wheat flour. The sprouted spelt berries really add a nice texture to complement the flavor. I think it is a near perfect sandwich bread. So far it's made several delicious peanut butter banana sandwiches(my favorite snack).  It's likely going to be my go to sandwich bread as long as I've got some sprouted wheat available.

For the formula, process and more photos visit abreaducation.

breaducation's picture
breaducation

I have been on a bit of a country bread kick lately but I’m always trying to mix it up. For my latest variation I’ve replaced the typical 10% whole wheat flour in a country bread with 15% sprouted wheat.

Although I don’t have that much experience using sprouted grains it’s something that has always intrigued me. Mainly because of the purported health benefits but also because of the delicious flavor.

For one thing, when you use a sprouted grain like wheat you are using the entire grain. At this point it’s already much more nutritious than white flour but not any better than your average whole wheat flour. What causes sprouted grains to excel so greatly in nutrition is the activation of enzymes in the sprouting process. These enzymes breakdown some starches before they get to your body making bread made from these grains easier to digest. The sprouting also increases levels of some vitamins and protein.

On top of all these nutritional advantages sprouted wheat also tastes great! It is much more sweet tasting than whole wheat flour and doesn’t have any of the bitterness. It’s these flavors that led me to the idea of trying sprouted wheat in a country bread.

The finished loaf had outstanding flavor! It was quite sweet from the sprouted wheat and very mildly sour probably from making it as a straight dough instead of retarding. I feel like I could increase the sprouted wheat to 25-35% of dough weight and still get a great mild sprouted wheat flavor. If I went that high with normal whole wheat it would dominate the flavor and have that bitter whole wheat taste. I think I’m going to be using sprouted wheat a lot more often in my breads.

For the formula, process and more photos visit aBreaducation.

Isand66's picture
Isand66

I just received my new order from KAF the other day and was dying to try some of my new flours I ordered.  I wasn't too happy though when I received an email the day after it arrived telling me how excited I should be about the KAF 20% off sale!

Anyway I digress....I decided to try my new Sprouted Wheat Flour which was not milled by KAF but apparently they distribute this brand.  I also used another new interesting flour which was made from 100% oats.  Along with these 2 flours I added a large amount of French Style Flour which added to the silkiness of this dough.  I have used this flour many times before and it is great for baguettes or ciabatta but I also find it very nice for developing the nice open crumb I like.

I refreshed my standard AP white starter the night before and used most of it in this bake.  I have also included the ingredients to make the exact amount of starter needed from your seed starter.  Mine is kept at 65% hydration so adjust yours accordingly.

The final dough was a nice mild sourdough with a hint of nuttiness from the oat flour and sprouted wheat flour.  The crumb was not too moist and had a nice open crumb and overall this was a nice bread worth making again for sure.  I used it for a nice pastrami sandwich last night which I ate while tailgating at the Brad Paisley concert at Jones beach.  I am not a big fan of country music by I do have to say he puts on a great show.  Could have done without the rain storm and cold winds in June but we all had fun anyway.

Starter

71 grams Seed (Mine is 65% AP Flour Starter)

227 grams AP Flour

151 grams Water (85 - 90 degrees F.)

Mix seed with water to break up for a few seconds and then mix in flour until the starter form a smooth dough consistency.  Put it in a lightly oiled bowl and loosely cover and leave at room temperature for at least 10 hours.  The starter should double in volume.  Put the starter in the refrigerator for up to 1-2 days or use it immediately.

Main Dough

Ingredients

425 grams Starter from above (all of the starter)

200 grams French Style Flour

200 grams Sprouted Wheat Flour

167 grams Oat Flour

425 grams Water (90 degrees F.)

18 grams Sea Salt (or table salt)

Procedure

I mixed  the flours together with all the water except for 50 grams and let them autolyes for 1 hour.    After an hour  I added the levain and the water with the salt and mixed on speed #1 for 1 minute and #2 for 4 minutes.  I then did a stretch and fold, rested the dough uncovered for 10 minutes.  I then did another stretch and fold, covered the dough and let it rest for 10 minutes.  I did one more stretch and fold and put it in a lightly oiled bowl for 1.5 hours.  I then put it in the fridge overnight.

The next day I let the dough sit out at room temperature for 1.5 hours.  After 1.5 hours I formed it into loaves and put them in floured bannetons and let them rise covered for 2 hours.  Score the loaves as desired and prepare your oven for baking with steam.

I then baked on my oven stone with steam at 450 degrees until both loaves were golden brown and reached an internal temperature of 200 - 210 degrees F.

I got a nice bloom with my scoring, actually more than I expected.  One loaf I tried a curved scoring pattern which came out pretty nice.

It was so nice outside yesterday I decided to shoot the finished loaves outside in my garden.  The summer flours flowers are just starting to bloom in earnest making this one of my favorite times of the year.

 

Salome's picture
Salome

100 % sprouted grains? 'Sounds great and interesting', I said to myself and printed the Recipe of Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads a couple weeks ago. This weekend I gave it a try.

I sprouted my grains as indicated. They all had cute little white tails and were pleasant to chew. I would have better kept them as a addition to my breakfast cereals instead of trying to make them into a bread.

"grind the grains into a pulp as fine as possible. If the grains warm up to much, let them rest for ten minutes and continue when cooled. A meat grinder works even better" - That's what Reinhart wrote. I should have been an english native to know what exactly a food processor is. I tried everything, and everything failed.

my kenwood mixer . . .

the mixer which normally fixes everything, the legendary bamix . . . mühle The bamix addon grinder . . .

even the kenwood grater . . .

and last but not least, in desperation, I tried it with a passevite.

I fought about an hour, ended up with my bamix. All the other things blocked because of this doughy/grainy mass. My bamix just got very hot, so I decided to call it for good, even though there were still some whole grains. I added yeast, honey, salt, water and Vital Wheat Gluten, then fermentation, shaping, proofing, baking, cooling, slicing.

The result of this struggle? My bamix is somewhat weird. The exchangeable blades are very hard to remove and to put on again. (I hope my mom won't find out.) I washed kitchen equipment for about an hour. And I've got a bread which is jar-muscle-excercise. It is light, but the grains . . . Flavorwise, it's just bread. seriously, I had much better whole grain breads. I don't notice an exciting difference trough the sprouting and because of the considerable amount of yeast added, no other interesting flavors emerged. Even my family noticed a "lack" in flavor compared to other breads I bake.

You wan't to see pictures?I know the bread looks decent, but before you try it: Think about what gear you've got.

Salome

xaipete's picture
xaipete

sprouted wheat bread

I've been feeling a little guilty about all of the refined flour breads we've been eating lately, so on Friday, I decided to make a batch of our old standby, 100% Sprouted Wheat Bread. I've made this bread dozens of times but not once in the last four months. I began soaking the grains on Friday and sprouted them this morning. After they were sprouted, about 6 hours, I ground them with the meat grinder attachment to my KA. I had had the brilliant idea that if I knew the weight of the KA bowl, I could add the ingredients to the bowl and save myself a little clean up. So I proceeded merrily along. When I got to the adding the water, the last ingredient, the scale read "err" but I didn't worry. After all I've made this recipe so many times. Well that was my second mistake (the first was thinking my scale could handle the weight). To make a long story shorter--or day of cleaning up a whole bunch of devices--I put way to much water in the bowl. I don't usually add more than a few tablespoons of whole-wheat flour to this bread and that is solely for the purpose of getting my "C" hook to pick up the dough and knead it properly. I also don't usually keep much whole-wheat flour around since I grind my own as needed. Well 3 cups of whole wheat flour and 2 cups of bread flour later, having now made a mess of my KA, my kneading counter, and my large capacity food processor, I finally got enough flour in the mix and got it kneaded. I ended up using my food processor to knead it in two batches.

I knew it would come out OK because it looked like bread dough after being processed. It is a pretty warm day here today, so its first rise went pretty fast and its second, even faster. One batch of dough normally makes three 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaves, but because I had to put so much flour in the dough, I opted for four loaves. Everything looked pretty good so I popped them in the oven. Why I thought they should be on a rack positioned in the middle of the oven is now a mystery to me but that was my third error for the day. When I checked them at 20 minutes I didn't notice that they were browning too fast, but it was pretty evident when I pulled them out of the oven at 40 minutes.

These are not the tastiest or prettiest loaves of sprouted wheat to come out of my kitchen, but in spite of everything they taste fine--perhaps a little more like whole wheat than sprouted this time--with a crumb that's not bad considering what they've been through. I eventually got all the paraphernalia that I used cleaned up too. Well so much for trying to save having to wash a bowl!

The recipe is here.

sprouted wheat bread

 

shakleford's picture
shakleford

Almost every weekend, I make one loaf of what I think of as "sandwich bread".  As you might expect from this nomenclature, this is the loaf that I'll be using for sandwiches in the coming week.  I generally pick recipes that are reliable, fairly plain, and light enough to make a good sandwich (admittedly, I like dense breads, so I might be less strict about this last criterion than many of you).  My more experimental recipes, or those including fruit or nuts or lots of herbs or other goodies, or those that are just extremely dense, fall under what I think of as my "dinner bread" category.

This week's sandwich bread was a 100% sprouted wheat bread from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book.  My first attempt at this recipe was a few weeks ago.  Since that was my first time sprouting grains I didn't really know what to expect, and for some reason thought that I would be able to easily chop/mash the sprouts by hand.  This didn't work out so well and I was instead forced to grind my sprouts in small batches in an old coffee grinder.  The resulting mess (I hesitate to use the term "dough") rose only very slightly, giving me my first real brick.  It was an extremely tasty brick, but even so, would not have made very impressive sandwiches -- fortunately, that loaf was intended as a dinner bread, so I was able to enjoy it anyway.

Since then I have acquired a food processor to help chop my sprouts, so I decided to try the sprout bread again this weekend, and go all-out by using it as a sandwich bread.  Beginning Wednesday evening, I started soaking 1.25 pounds of hard red wheat berries.  Sprouting is pretty simple; you rinse the berries around three times per day, and other than that, just let them soak on your counter.  Just the same, I get a kick out of this part, as it sort of lets me combine another of my hobbies, gardening, with my baking.

By Saturday morning, the sprouts were just beginning to show.  I drained and dried the berries and stuck them in the refrigerator in anticipation of the heating they would experience when I began to process them.  A few hours later, I combined them with some honey, yeast, and salt in my food processor and gave it its inaugural run.  I initially planned to process half at a time, but it turned out that there was plenty of room for all of it.

Having never used a food processor in my bread-baking before, I was a bit nervous, but things worked out very well.  I processed in increments of around 20 seconds, between which I would scrape the dough together, break up any larger pieces, and check the temperature.  I stopped when the dough was circling around on top of the blades rather than being mixed any further.  At this point, it was still a bit below room temperature and passed the windowpane test with flying colors.

Ground Sprouts

After this, I kneaded for a few minutes, more to get a feel for the dough and to pick out a few whole wheat berries that had stuck under the food processor blade than for any real need to develop the gluten further.  The dough was somewhat sticky, but certainly manageable.  The texture was coarser than dough made out of flour, but still relatively smooth.

After I finished kneading, I put the dough through the two rises and proof standard in Laurel's approach to bread-baking.  Below is an image of the dough just before it began proofing.  As you can see, it is a fairly large amount of dough for one loaf.  This is because sprout bread is not known for its spectacular rises -- in fact, Peter Reinhart recommends significant added gluten as an (optional) ingredient in the similar recipe in Whole Grain Breads.  I'm not necessarily opposed to using gluten (though it does feel a bit like cheating), but wanted to try the recipe at least once without it.

Sprout Bread Proof

Up to the point that I put the loaf in the oven, the rises had been adequate but not spectacular, so I was not sure what to expect for a final result.  Fortunately, oven spring came to the rescue again.  While the below result will not set any records for lightness, I was quite happy with how much it rose for a 100% sprout bread.  What my lousy camera cannot show is the beautiful texture in the crust from the large pieces of bran.

I won't actually cut into this loaf until tomorrow, but right now I am cautiously optimistic that it was a success.  The appearance of the crust gives me high hopes of a terrific texture throughout the loaf, and I'll be pleased if the taste is anything like my previous attempt at this recipe.  The only possible problem I see right now is that the crust does seem a bit tough - next time, I may try cooking with steam.  I'm also interested in sprouting other grains along with the wheat, but would probably not do this in a 100% sprouted grain bread, or at least not one that I planned to make sandwiches with.

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