The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [111]
To make this bread using your food processor, turn the page.
In developing this recipe, we had help from Al Giusto, who has been making sprouted wheat bread for the natural foods market in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. His bread is featherlight, velvet-textured, excellent. For him, the secret is the extremely fine grind. Coarse or fine, though, the bread is good.
In this recipe the trick is to sprout the grain just until the tiny sprout is barely beginning to show and the grain itself is tender—about 48 hours. If the grain is not tender, your grinder will heat up, making the dough too hot. But if the sprout develops long enough for diastatic enzymes to get going, you will have very gooey bread that will never bake through. It is because the grain is not sprouted long enough to develop the enzymes and be sweetened by them that the recipe calls for a generous amount of honey. Without it, the bread simply doesn’t taste very good.
This recipe, as we mention above, is based on what we can make with our grinder or food processor. If you have equipment that can produce a really smooth grind with only tiny bran particles, the resulting dough will make lighter bread and so probably be more than enough for two loaves. You can either make a few rolls or buns with the extra, or reduce the quantities to what you would use for two normal loaves: 2 pounds of wheat, ¼ cup honey, 2 ½ teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons yeast.
Sprout the wheat berries as described above, drain them very well, and cool them in the refrigerator for several hours.
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water.
Add the honey, salt, and yeast to the ground sprouts and mix together well. The dough will feel sticky but stiff. Add water if needed to soften the dough, but be cautious, it should be just right without it. Knead well. This is not so easy as with a normal dough, particularly if the grain is coarsely ground; it takes plenty of work to develop the gluten fully. Knead until the dough is really elastic, considerably longer than the usual amount of time.
Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Cover and keep in a warm draft-free place. After about an hour and a half, gently poke the center of the dough about ½ inch deep with your wet finger. If the hole doesn’t fill in at all or if the dough sighs, it is ready for the next step. Press flat, form into a smooth round, and let the dough rise once more as before. If the dough is cold, which it may be unless your grinder warmed it up, the first rise will be fairly slow, but as the dough warms up, the rising will telescope.
Divide in half and gently knead into rounds. Use water on your hands to prevent sticking, and keep the balls as smooth as possible. Let them rest until they regain their suppleness while you grease two standard 8″ 4″ loaf pans, or pie tins, or a cookie sheet. Press the dough flat and divide in two. Round it and let it rest until relaxed, then deflate and shape into loaves. Place in greased loaf pans and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until the dough slowly returns a gently made fingerprint. Bake about an hour at 350°F, though if your bread rises very high, it will take less than that.
6 cups hard spring or winter wheat berries, (2 ½ lb or 1135 g), a little more than 3 quarts sprouted, weighing about 4 lb (2 k)
2 teaspoons active dry yeast (¼ oz or 7 g)
¼ cup warm water (60 ml)
⅓ cup honey (80 ml)
4 teaspoons salt (22 g)
SPROUT BREAD IN YOUR FOOD PROCESSOR
FOR ONE LOAF
3 cups hard spring wheat berries (1 ¼ lb or 575 g), (about 6 cups sprouted)
1 teaspoon active dry yeast (⅛ oz or 3.5 g)
2 tablespoons warm water (30 ml)
2 teaspoons salt (11 g)
3 scant tablespoons honey (40 ml)
Sprout bread makes excellent use of the talents of food processors. The steel blade grinds the sprouts and kneads the dough too—a big contribution