I really hope you all will be able to help me troubleshoot my problem.  Please bear with me as I explain this.  I have been baking bread using sprouted wheat.  I sprout the wheat myself until it is just minimally sprouted, it doesn't have a tail at all just a bud starting to show.  Then I put the wheat in the dehydrator.  When it is dry I store it, when it is baking day I mill it and bake my bread as I usually do.  Now I have done this a number of times with a locally grown purple wheat that I have access to.  The results have been beyond fantastic.  Something about the starch in the wheat being converted into a simple sugar during the sprouting process makes the yeast behave like it is on steroids and the resulting bread is so soft and tender.  The flavor of the wheat really comes through along with a nice subtle sweetness, it is really remarkable.  The best part is that friends and family with wheat sensitivities and even allergies are able to eat this bread with no problems.  Okay so that works.  So I did the exact same thing but this time I used regular spring wheat.  I sprouted it the same, I dehydrated it the same and used the same recipe.  But this time the loaves wouldn't really rise, they did swell a bit but they just tore open, leaving big holes in the loaves.  I saved it by turning the whole mess into buns.  They also tore but it wasn't as noticeable.  I baked the second time using the same sprouted wheat.  I was very careful to do every thing right and I had the same result.  What is going on here?  Am I missing something?  That spring wheat I am using is a good quality wheat, I have baked bread with it without sprouting it and it works just fine.  I really would like to figure this out.  I am going thank you all right now for all your help.  There is such a great bunch here and I really value your opinions.

Hi,

I want to host a conference/gathering for bakers of sprouted wheat breads. Commercial bakers and home bakers. Anyone who has been working to perfect the wonderful breads that are derived from sprouted wheat. At Columbia County Breads, we buy our wheat from local organic farmers and bake our sprouted whole grain breads in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania - about two and a half hours due west from NYC. 

If you're at all interested, please contact me as we would love to host a yearly gathering to share information, techniques, tips and breads and dispel myths and false claims about sprouting and sprouting techniques. The time frame for this gathering is likely to be fall of 2011 but no date has been set.

Thanks so much,

Doug

baker

columbia county bread & granola

www.columbiacountybread.com

baker@columbiacountybread.com

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 . . . 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

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 Sourdough

My wife started an anti-arthritis diet that called for wheat only in a sprouted form so I revived my interest in sprouted wheat bread. I notice there are recipes for 100% sprouted wheat bread on the internet but they used a blender. My suggestion is to use a meat grinder to process the sprouted wheat. The meat grinder does not get the wheat as finely ground as regular flour but it works very well and you get a little exercise in the process. Plus you can make large batches of dough. We bought our meat grinder from Leman’s online catalog. It’s called a Porkert, which gives us a laugh as vegetarians. I use a sourdough starter but I have had trouble with big loaves not getting completely cooked in the middle so I’ve reverted to making bread sticks, which I love. After the initial sponge has risen, I use some non-wheat flour like rye or rice when I kneed the bread. I like the sweetness that the sprouted wheat gives the bread and I enjoy watching the wheat berries coming to life. I put them in the sun at the end to get a little solar energy. This has been a fun process for me drawing on experiments from my hippie days. If anyone has suggestions, it would be much appreciated.

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.

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.

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.

Wheat berries soaking during the sprouting process