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You can soften grain for using in your dough in several ways. Probably the easiest is to rinse a cup of grain and stir in a cup of boiling water, letting it stand, covered, until the water is absorbed. If you use more water, as you would if you were cooking the wheat for normal eating, it will be too fluffy and tender to keep its shape in the dough.

Wheat berries from red wheat, sprouted two or three days, make a very good show in a whole wheat loaf. Knead them, about half a cupful per loaf, into any bouncy plain bread dough. Slightly less wonderful but plenty good are unsprouted whole berries cooked chewy-tender, kneaded into the dough in the same proportion.

OATS

Oats give whole wheat a subtle sweetness and a little extra chew. The flavor of oats blends well with wheat, mellowing it and making it taste richer. You can use rolled oats uncooked in bread but it won’t be any lighter for their presence. On the other hand, if you use porridge made from rolled oats to replace most of the liquid in bread dough, the result is an exceptionally light and chewy-tender loaf.

Steel-cut oats or oat groats must be cooked. Bread using their porridge makes a slightly heavier, moister loaf, but one with outstanding eating quality that keeps very well.

For a very pretty crust on dark breads especially, or on any bread with oats inside, coat the loaf with rolled oats after shaping. Either spread the oats on the table and roll the loaf in them, or just sprinkle them in the greased pan before you put the bread into it; for the top, brush with milk or water and dust with oats just before putting the bread in the oven. Hearth loaves can be baked on a rolled-oat-strewn baking sheet, but strew with a light hand: too thick a layer will keep the loaf from cooking on the bottom.

BARLEY

Ordinary barley has tough, sharp hulls that adhere so tightly that the grain must be milled many times—“pearled”—to get them off; the germ and the useful bran layers are lost in the milling, needless to say, along with the indigestible hull. We can’t recommend using pearl barley. But recently a naturally hull-less barley has become available in some places. We are told it’s an ancient grain, probably originally from Tibet. If you can get it, you will enjoy making porridge from it, and using the porridge in your bread, as we describe in the oatmeal section.

CORN

Nearly everybody likes the sweet flavor of corn and its sunny color. In yeasted bread, corn poses unique problems and takes a little extra care to achieve a light loaf.

The most cornmeal you can just plunk into a normal twoloaf whole wheat bread recipe is about ½ cup, substituted for that much wheat flour. The bread may be a little dense, but it should be tasty. It is much better to cook the corn first, and then add it to well-kneaded dough made with finely ground high gluten flour. Even then, corn softens the wheat gluten and you may begin to think you will have to pour the dough into the pan—but if you follow the method described in the Anadama recipe, you can have light, delicious bread in a very corny mood.

Generally choose cornmeal that is as coarsely ground as possible. Your loaves will be lighter and the corn will show up better.

Cook the cornmeal before you add it to the kneaded dough, using as little water as possible. If your recipe calls for oil, stir it into the cooled corn mush before adding it to the dough.

A final word on corn: once ground, it turns rancid rapidly. This is a phenomenon of recent years, a side effect of breeding corn for very high-yield crops. Maybe in the near future breeders will be able to correct the problem, but in the meantime virtually all the cornmeal—degermed or not—and other corn products that are sold commercially are a little rancid, a little bitter. Cornmeal that is really fresh—homeground, most likely, and stored (in the refrigerator) for less than five days—is sweet sweet sweet, an astonishing difference no one can fail to celebrate.

MILLET

Millet sold for human consumption is hulled, and its