The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [108]
*If you already have Laurel’s Kitchen, you probably know about Mock Sour Cream, but if not just blend these ingredients well: 1 cup low fat cottage cheese, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 3 tablespoons mayonnaise, ¼ cup buttermilk. Makes about 1 ½ cups.
Sprouts & Spuds
SOME NATURAL DOUGH CONDITIONERS
In our search for ways to make the home baker’s job easier, we looked for natural equivalents for the dozens of chemicals bakers use, figuring that if professionals resort to such aids, surely there must be a few innocent additives that would be helpful in the home kitchen. We tried a lot of things that we read about, including ginger, garlic, crushed vitamin C tablets, slippery elm bark, and rose hip tea. None of them made much difference so far as we could tell, though we did produce some pretty flavorful loaves. Some time later, our cereal scientist friends told us that even many commercial additives don’t have much effect when used with whole wheat.
In our researching attempts, some of the most interesting information we came across was in old books written for bakers—books published around 1920, when the local bakery still might or might not have a kneading machine. For example, one book suggested that adding a tiny amount of wheat germ to your white flour had an improving effect on the dough. The amount suggested was not too different from the amount that occurs naturally in whole wheat flour. The one additive that all the old books praised was potatoes, and of the things you can add to bread, we too like potatoes best. Potato bread recipes, and information about using potatoes, appear in the pages that follow. (By the way, we did finally include the rose hip tea; its fruitiness brightens and warms—and who knows? perhaps lightens—our Orange Rye Bread. See this page.)
The additive you most often find listed on the side of white flour sacks is malted barley flour. It is incorporated when the flour has been found to be deficient in diastatic enzymes. Whole wheat flour is seldom supplemented in this way. If you would like to use dimalt (that is, diastatic malt flour) in your bread for sweetness, and you don’t like the fancy prices they charge for it in the health food store, you can make your own; it is simple to do, as we explain in the pages that follow.
Some other ingredients that are an integral part of many recipes—soy flour, for example, or milk products—do condition and improve the dough; we have discussed their talents in their respective sections. The Great Granddaddy of all dough conditioners, of course, and a high-tech one at that, is yeast. But aside from lively yeast, the two essentials for light bread are basic: fresh high-gluten flour and plenty of kneading.
About Sprouting & Malting
In the following pages, wheat is sprouted three different lengths of time to produce three very distinct kinds of sprouts. They are not interchangeable. If the grain is sprouted only a little, it can be ground into dough to make airy yeasted bread. Sprouted longer before grinding, it will make a dense, caky loaf. Sprouted still longer, until enzyme activity is at its peak, the grain, ground and dried, becomes malt flour, or dimalt.
The crucial element here is the timing. So much is going on so fast in those tiny powerhouses we call sprouting grains that there is very little leeway for using them in the recipes: one talent develops, peaks and fades, and another appears, only to have its brief flowering and also pass away. If your sprouts are at their best when you aren’t, or vice-versa, put them in the refrigerator to use later in casseroles or salads; they are delicious. And by all means try again.
HOW TO SPROUT WHEAT
Rinse the grain and cover with tepid water, letting it stand 12 to 18 hours at room temperature. Allow the longer period in cooler weather, the shorter period in warm.
Drain off the liquid, rinse the grain with fresh, tepid water, and store in a dark place with a damp cloth over the top of the container. Rinse at least every 12 hours for as many days as is specified in the recipe