The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [73]
As you finish shaping each one, dip the flower side into a dish of poppy seeds and place it upside down on a greased baking sheet, with enough room so that the rolls won’t touch each other when they rise. You can get about 8 on a 12″ 18″ baking sheet. Allow them a good hour to proof, in a warm, dry place—then pick up each one and very gently turn it right side up on the baking sheet. Pop them into a very hot oven: for best results, preheat the oven to 450°F and steam it (see this page) for 10 to 15 minutes. Turn the oven down and bake the rolls for about 15 minutes more at 350°F. They are done when crispy brown all over. If possible, bake them near the top of the oven. If you bake on the bottom rack, put an extra baking sheet under the pan on the bottom so that the rolls don’t burn.
*For the highest bread, do not use raw honey in a long fermentation like this one. Use pasteurized honey, or else a refined sweetener like brown sugar.
With the Grains
Here converge two opposing schools of breadbaking. On the one hand is the crowd who will add nearly anything—certainly any leftover cereal—to bread dough: the motive can be earnest Thrift; sometimes it’s a kind of unabashed bravado. These good folks are genuinely fond of their inevitably hearty loaves, and even when some of their friends don’t share their enthusiasm, it turns out all right because a bread that has a lot of cooked grain in it will not stale quickly.
In the second school, rather more button-down, are those who admire the featherlight commercial “honey-wheatberry” bread and long for a recipe that will enable them to make such loaves In Their Own Kitchens: they want to reproduce the pale, airy, sweet, tender loaves, luscious with soft nuggets of Real Wheat strewn throughout. Alas, careful reading of the fine print on the wrapper reveals that the first (hence, the most plentiful) ingredient is white flour—cunningly called “wheat” flour, but not “whole wheat.” Very few home bakers would be able to replicate that bread with whole wheat flour; now you are one of them, should you be so inclined.
Whichever school you favor, and even if you are not ready to join either, this section will be useful if you are interested in including whole and cracked grains, and grains other than wheat, in your breads. Generally, these are not recipes for beginners: quirks and pitfalls lurk here, which is why we have gone into such detail on the grains.
WHEAT
Here, we are talking about wheat that isn’t ground into flour—about whole berries or berries that have been cracked, and about bulgur wheat, a special kind of cracked wheat that is particularly good for baking.
Cracked Wheat You can make nubbly, pretty bread with ordinary cracked wheat, but it takes some doing. For one thing, it is the same color as the dough, and so tends to be invisible. (We suggest a remedy for that in the recipe.) The other problem with cracked wheat is that it is often too finely ground. When you buy it, or if you grind your own, try to get a crack that is nearly half of a wheat berry—very large. Most we’ve seen on store shelves is really sort of a wheat meal, and when added to bread it does nothing more than make it heavy and crumbly. If you mill your own, it is worth sifting out the smaller particles.
Bulgur wheat is the sort of cracked wheat we like best for adding to bread. Use the coarsest size. It keeps its shape with noble persistence, and is different enough in color to show up against wheat dough. Natural foods stores often sell bulgur in bulk,