The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [75]
For less crunch, cook the millet in water. You can add a cup per loaf or more; if the grain is well cooked you won’t see it in the slice. The loaf will very likely be a little heavy, but it will be moist and will have millet’s sunshiny warmth of flavor. For a very good millet bread, add cooked millet as part of the water measure in a light plain recipe like Buttermilk Bread.
BUCKWHEAT GROATS
Kasha, as the Russians call it, or whole groats have every advantage in breadmaking over the flour ground from them. The flour is heavy; even a little bit makes bread grayish and dense. The groats, however, properly prepared, can flavor the loaf without weighing it down.
Rinse the grain and heat and stir in a heavy pan until lightly toasted and fragrant. Mixing a beaten egg into a cup of groats before toasting is traditional and does help to keep the grains whole and separate; if you don’t have a nonstick pan, a little oil helps prevent sticking. After toasting, you can either cool the groats and add them as is to the dry ingredients for the recipe, or knead them in later. Or you can soften them a little, and instead of white sparkling crunchies in the slice, you will have soft taupe nubbets. To soften, pour boiling water over the hot toasted grain. Use water to equal only half the measure of the groats: stir it in, and cover tightly until the water is absorbed and the grain cool. If you are tempted to use leftover kasha (cooked groats, that is) or to cook the grain in the amount of water for normal eating, it will turn mushy and disappear into the dough. This does not make for light bread. Raisins and sunflower seeds are good with buckwheat.
RICE
It is sometimes suggested that leftover rice (brown rice, of course) be added to wheat dough. Add one cup to a plain, light loaf’s worth of dough, and you will have a chewy, rather flattasting bread with rice grains showing throughout. A more interesting approach is to use rice in one of the “naturally fermented” breads. Their fuller flavor and greater density accommodate rice’s subtlety very well. See this page.
RYE & TRITICALE
Either of these is good to use like wheat, cracked or whole, as described 2 pages back. Both are also useful ground into flour, as we will see in the pages that follow.
SOY GRITS
Soy grits—the largest crack possible—make a very successful cracked “grain” in bread, with a nutritional plus. Be sure to precook them, even the toasted ones, for 15 minutes or more in an equal quantity of boiling water; otherwise, they can rip up your dough. About ⅓ cup of cooked grits per loaf is a reasonable amount. For the best flavor, sweeter and not so beany, choose untoasted grits.
MIXED GRAIN CEREALS IN BREAD
There is a large natural foods firm in these parts that sells a nine-grain bread; for a commercially produced loaf, it is excellent. We buy and enjoy their nine-grain cereal, and so decided to try to make up our own version of the bread. For starters, we just added leftover cooked cereal to dough, as we have done successfully with oatmeal—but what a disaster!
The cereal contains wheat, rye, barley, triticale, corn, oats, millet, flax, and soy grits—an innocent list, but somewhere in there was dynamite for the dough. (Another time we put the uncooked cereal, which is quite finely ground, into rolls. Added along with some sautéed onions and Parmesan cheese to well-kneaded dough made with strong coarse flour, it made big light soft rough-hewn “Raggedy Rolls”: they were great.) But why tell you all this? I think it is by way of saying that someone else’s mix of grains may not be just what you would want, and there are more reliable ways