April 5, 2015 - 1:05am
wheat bran
I usually buy at the grocery store a Scandinavian bread. The ingredients are: unprocessed wheat bran (85%), rye flour (14.7%) salt (0.3%)
I want to try to bake this bread at home.
My question is, how do I separate the bran when I am milling? I have Schnitzer grain mili
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Just sift the flour - what remains in the sieve will be bran (husk) and possibly the wheat germ too.
And you'll have a light brown flour left.
Often called a flour bolter - used by the mills stone grinding grain to separate it out after milling, and usually made from cloth. (roller mills can do the separation at milling time)
85% bran - that's going to be a very coarse bread - sounds more like a crispbread than a loaf to me...
-Gordon
which kind of sieve do I need?
Should I grind my grains coarse or fine?
It is a crispbread, it is really good with salmon and salad!
I've really no idea - I'd start with whatever you have in your kitchen and see what you get.
However... I'm not sure you'll be able to re-create a commercial recipe based on ingredients alone, so what about researching something that looks similar, but gives you the full recipe & process?
My suspicion is that a commercial recipe has the wheat bran in it because that's cheaper than using Rye flour on its own (ie. used as a cheap bulking agent). There are lots of recipes for Rye based crispbreads (as well as buying Ryvita ;-)
e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/16/nigel-slater-recipes-crispbread seems to be a basic Rye crispbread recipe (to go with salmon too!) A standard 7g sachet of dried yeast will work with that recipe if you don't have fresh yeast.
Good luck with it!
-Gordon
I can't eat yeast ( I can use only soda as raising agent) and I have been eating rice cakes for ages. Rice cakes taste like paper and I was very happy to find the Scandinavian bread at the store. Now finally I can eat bread! I've never baked any kind of bread, can I use just rye flour on its own? Since I eat the Scandinavian bread,my health is improved, I think because I added fibers in my diet. I used to eat very little fibers, my metabolism is too fast and the fibers are helping to slow it down.
Um, not sure what to suggest then. wholemeal rye is as high in fibre as wholemeal wheat flour, but the gluten doesn't form the same way - you could try it with baking powder, but I'm really not sure what to expect.
You can buy bran - try your local whole foods shop, or online - e.g. http://www.healthysupplies.co.uk/organic-wheat-bran-1kg-sussex.html but I appreciate you wanting to mill your own.
Is it just commercial yeast you don't tolerate? Have you tried sourdough yeast - which you make yourself (using Rye is the easiest way to get it started too) I've always wondered what the whole yeast free thing is about - yeast is as dead as a dead thing and will never come back alive again once its cooked into bread, etc. you'll eat more live yeast eating an apple than a loaf of bread.
-Gordon
I used to eat a lot of bread back in my home country (Italy) and I never had problems. Since I live in Ireland I can't eat bread anymore. The bread here is completely different,they sell it at the grocery store and there are not bakeries. Also the bread don't became hard the day after, but it is still soft and after a few days some mold will grow. In Italy the bread last only one day, the day after is hard as a rock. Maybe in Italy the bread is made with sourdough yeast? anyway I had a blood test and I am intolerant to all the yeast but the chemical one. I will going to try to made sourdough yeast, but since the bread I am eating now doesn't give me any side effect I want to try to do it at home. I really don't want to by bran after spending so much money for a grain mill. I guess I have to experiment. Thanks for all your advise, I find this forum very useful!
America 25 years ago from Italy and made all of her bread for her restaurant in Galveston TX. I asked her if she made Sourdough bread and she said people didn't make SD bread in Italy. I thought that this was odd because we know some folks do make SD bread in Italy.. What you describe as going hard and stale the next day is common with commercial yeast bread since SD would stay fresh for days. I suspect that the bread you had in Italy was made with commercial yeast too..
I think that SD bread may work out better for you from a health standpoint though but it won't go hard and stale in 24 hours.
Happy baking
I just sent an email to a bakery over there asking for this.
If with sourdough bread lasts for days definitely is not made using sourdough.
You're probably suffering from some issues to do with the mass produced white stuff they call bread in the UK (and Ireland, I suspect). Google for the Chorleywood Bread Process for the gory details.
I'd give sourdough, or even a longer fermented dough a go if you can. e.g. look for recipes for an overnight no-knead bread. I suspect (hope!) good Italian bread is longer fermented and made with a less mechanised process than the CBP...
Alternatively, since you're in Ireland, try Irish soda bread...
Take some flour - any old flour - the roughest, most wholemeal you can get - e.g. right out of your mill. Make some buttermilk if you can't buy it - take half a pint of milk, add in a tablespoon of lemon juice, stir and leave it until its thick - about 20 minutes. Use the (fake) butter milk with the flour and a teaspoon of bicarb and half a teaspoon of salt. Mix it into a sticky dough. Dust with more flour, cut a deep cross shape into the top and transfer it to a baking sheet - pop that into a hot oven (220C) for 25 minutes or so. The quickest bread you can make...
-Gordon
(Note for others not this side of the pond, buttermilk is not readily available here - it went out of fashion years ago and is hard to come by, so fake butter milk made with lemon is good enough for this)
I have never heard of this, but I have read about a process that makes bread in a really short time and I have also read that is not healthy. You must be right, I might have problem with this mass produced bread. Unfortunately in Italy many bakeries are closing and they are selling the same bread in the supermarket! this is a disaster!!People don't have or don't want to take more time to prepare bread and to buy bread?
This is the reason why I bought a grain mill.
I bought a few books about sourdough and I will try it soon. Thanks for the Irish soda bread, I can find buttermilk here in Dublin, it seems very easy and I want to start with an easy recipe.
CBP bread is healthy enough for most folks - about 80% of the bread made in the UK is made that way. I'm not a fan of it, although I have no issues eating it - but there is a small fraction of folk who do have (health) issues eating it - and some folks believe it's the ultra-short ferment and high speed mechanical processing plus the invisible "processing aids" that contribute to this.
You might want to have a look at the Read Bread Campaign site - they're based in London. http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/ for a lot more information... Looks like there are 3 or 4 real bread bakeries in and around Dublin too. See this:
http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/bakery_finder/?postcode=dublin&submit=go
and one of them, Bretzel, (1a Lennox Street, Portobello, Dublin, D8) appears to be an Italian bakery too so you may not have to go far at all!
Before CBP breads, bread would typically take 2-3 hours to ferment in a bakery with some specialists extending this using a pre-ferment (poolish, bigga, sponge, etc.) and using big fridges to slow the process down too.
What I suggest you do is try some Irish soda bread using your own milled grains - see if you can find a source of organic wheat for it - and if you can get buttermilk locally then go for it. Have a look at this:
https://hobbshousebakery.co.uk/soda-bread-recipe-video/
I make that (or a variant) every now & then - it's a bit of a "boys bit of fun" type of thing :-) You might find you need to bake it a bit longer than they do though, depending on how hot you can get the oven...
And if you find that's OK then maybe try some overnight yeasted breads - slowly fermented which improves the flavour and hopefully makes it more digestible, although you'll need some grains that produce high gluten content flour. (ie. ones specifically for bread making)
-Gordon
is the Bretzel, they call it the Jewish bakery because it is own by Jewish. I never heard about the other bakeries, maybe they opened recently. There are Italians that sell bread but it is commercial
Unfortunately the bakery is too far away from my place. In Italy people can walk to the local bakery and some of the bakeries can bring the bread to their home. Here there are not local bakeries, but a lots of local pubs where you can walk to :)
I will start doing the soda bread, buttermilk is very easy to find here and my grains come from a biological farm in Germany
WOW! the video is really cool! I can't believe I can make my own butter!I found hard to find a simple recipe for soda bread, in many of them I found ingredients like sugar or eggs. I really wish I have their oven!
But we are going to build one in our house in Poland, so I will be able to experiment there!
For the yeast bread I will wait more time, I really don't want take the risk to be sick again!
this forum is great! finally I found a place when there are people that can answer my too difficult questions!thanks again Gordon
Stef
Ahh... Tesco stocks it. It usually lurks in among the selections of creams. ;-)
If you have issues with yeast you may want to try making salt rising bread. It uses clostridium bacteria instead of yeast to leaven the bread. It is a regional bread and very tasty. Here is a good site. http://home.comcast.net/~petsonk/
Liam2, actually, fifi did not give a full formula, but we can sort out some of the details. First, decide how much flour you want - do you want a large loaf, medium loaf or small loaf. If you have a scale, it is extremely easy using grams, a little tougher, and less accurate if you go with volume measurements like cups or tablespoons. First, fifi says of the flour in the dough, 85% is wheat bran and 14.7% ( though I would call it 15% using standard percentages ) is rye flour. If you were using grams and wanted to use 454 grams of flour, ( a pound of flour ) that would be 385 grams of wheat bran and 68 grams of rye. If you are using cups, I would get a piece of paper and write out the formula using percentages and then grams, then use a calculator and a conversion table to get cups. There are some places that let you put the number in and it will calculate, like here I chose rye flour, and it says 2/3 cup http://convert-to.com/287/rye-flour.html This is the one for salt, http://convert-to.com/456/table-salt-amounts-converter.html, you need to find one for wheat bran. Again, using 454 as the flour, we get 13 grams. ( 454 times .003 ) We don't know the water, so we can just guess the first time around then change accordingly. I would start with 70% which would be 317 grams, it it seems too wet, add more flour. Finally. you need to know what is added to make it rise. Is it yeast, or chemical leaveners. here is a yeast based recipe http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/scandinavian_rye_bread_93361
Here is another one that goes in a different direction. https://arcticgrub.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/trilogy-of-scandinavian-breads-part-1-rye-bread/
I did a short search and found others that used baking powder, so I can't be of much more help.