by anita sands hernandez astrology@earthlink.net
Why pay $4 a loaf for organic bread? You can make your own for twenty cents! Once a month, roll up your sleeves and freeze 3 loaves, keep one out. (Good practice in case there's a Riot or War and shops close.) Get your grain whole from a feed store for chump change. Here are some Bread making tips from somone who messed around making the stuff for years all by her lonesome, in order to learn the secrets of making bread as I had no bread guru.
TRY MANY DIFFERENT GRAINS: BUY THEM WHOLE. BIBLE BREAD (meaning no flour at all, completely made of a whole grain that was soaked, overnight, rinsed, PHYTIC ACID thrown away, THEN the pulverished groats are GROUND INTO DOUGH. Lickity split. The thing about this ancient tech which Bible extolled is: no acidity in mouth after you eat it, which destroys teeth! (flour, milled grain, acidic reaction in body.) HEALTHFOOD STORES sell bible bread for almost 4$ a loaf. It's made of grains like wheat, rye, spelt, kamut, millet, or mixes of same. I enjoy sesame in mine. Toasts up tastier. Original recipe in Bible had lentils, peas, barley, oats and you can add that to your recipes. As these loaves cost 3$ even 4$ a loaf at healthfood store, (Wheat doubled in wholesale cost from 4$ a bushetl to 9$ a bushel in 2007) but not to worry. Breadmaking is easy and can be done without a recipe on the 2nd occasion, make your own. Also, each meal should contain either brown rice, bulghur wheat, millet, quinoa, lentils, barley, or beans. Raw butter or garlic-flavored olive oil are added AFTER the grain is cooked. TO MAKE real bible bread out of whole soaked grain, THE VITA MIX machine is said to work best.Google it vita-mix and vitamix both. Once a month, make your own bread. GET WHEAT BERRIES. HORSE SHOPS HAVE THEM FEED & GRAIN stores. Use SPELT, BARLEY, Soak grains in water overnight, toss the rinse water, drain, fluff, air dry grain in a hot room. Immediately use a vita mix to grind them.Grind 2 cups at a time in VITA MIX . Any coffee grinder would work on smaller amts. and there are other options, blenders, food processors etc, REVIEWS OF THE OPTIONS exist..... but a vita mix is bigger, faster, better. MANYRECIPES and TIPS EXIST. Bake three loaves at a time, cool. Freeze two in tight bags. Slice the load that's out as needed, return to its tight bag,. Refrigerate it ---as Bible bread is alive. I keep mine frozen. Take two slices every a.m. toasted. But try this, let me know how it works out for you.
SECRET #1. USE DOUBLE THE AMT OF YEAST that recipe calls for as half of it's dead anyway. "PROOF" the yeast in body-temp to slightly hot, PURIFIED or spring WATER (not faucet with chlorine) with some sugar or honey in the water. LET IT SIT 15-20 min in a warm place, with no draughts on it. THEN, only take the FOAM, scoop it off with a double-tablespoon. LEAVE THE dead water and dead yeast below in the water. Throw it out. It makes bread taste bad. SEE, you are really using HALF of it, which is the amt. that recipe specified.
SECRET #2 THE LIQUIDS- The liquid ingredients want to have a considerable amount of sweetness added to them. Add honey or brown sugar in any amount you like. Four loaves could take up to an entire box of brown sugar. Add the sweetness to the liquids. Melt a few huge globs of butter in it, too. Up to a lb. of butter for four loaves. (Olive oil if you're making Italian, unsweetened bread, savory bread,) If you use Milk, add the honey to it, and bring it almost to a simmer. Turn off and cool to body temperature. That will kill bacteria in both milk and honey which would multiply in the 'raising' period. You can use any broths or vegie broths you have from today's cooked vegies. Broth is high in minerals. You can use potato water, or spring water. The liquids should be at room temp up to bathwater temp to give bread a running start with the WARMTH ISSUE. TOO HOT and you kill the yeast. Too cold and it won't rise. NO CHLORINATED WATER ever need come near your dough!
SECRET # 3. USE SPROUTED GRAINS. Lentils, Wheat, rye, millet. You will sprout them overnight in some spring water. HEALTHFOODERS BELIEVE in using sprouted grains not FLOUR which is acidic and unnatural and full of phytase which melts your bones. They leave whole grains reposing overnight in good, spring water, thusly sprouting them. Then use a "vita-mix" machine to grind them to paste. Doesn't have to ALL be sprouted grains but say half? Stir in the dry ingreds. and the grain paste or Pour your liquids into the grain paste, also the PUFFED UP PROOFED YEAST adding into the dry ingred, stir with big wooden spoon.
SECRET #4 The FIRST RISE should
be a couple of hours to make sure the PHYTIC ACID
which is in all grains (and is in the flour still as it isn't sprouted)
is dissipated. PHYTIC ACID causes excretion of our minerals. So for health,
all bread making should entail at least two hours of the first
rising. Throw some oil on the surface of the dough ball and COVER the
big dough ball with a damp torn sheet piece. Put in warm place. Tent the
oven door. If you have gas pilots, on stove. In a warm kitchen.
SECRET # 5. You now have a huge raised up ball of dough. At that point, we add the salt. I make my salt with toasted sesame seeds, grinding them together. Throw a few tbspns of that 'gomasio' Japanese call it, sesame salt, into the dough, knead it in. (Experiment with a few drops of chile sesame oil from oriental store, with the two items, you will get an unusual toasted sesame seed flavor in your bread.) NOW KNEAD! YOU really move the dough when you knead it. You stretch it as much as possible, concentrating on STRETCHING the dough into long ropes. That will DEVELOP THE GLUTEN, the rubbery factor in the grain. I found adding a few tbsps of gluten flour to my WHOLE GRAIN doughs made more elastic, higher rising loaves. Healthfood store has gluten. Sometimes you get lucky and a bread flour HAS a lot of gluten in it. A glutenous on the natch type of wheat.
SECRET #6. After kneading the salt /sesame into the dough for five minutes minimum, give the dough a SECOND RISING. This hour or more 'lift' ocurs right in the loaf pan or in the loaf form on an oiled baking sheet.
SECRET #7. This is the biggie. The OVEN has to be so hot, 425 or more that this fat, raised-up loaf is going to get HIT WITH THAT intense HEAT so the dough 'freezes' in position. The crust goes WHAMMY hard as a rock..then, after say 3-5 min at full roast, lower heat, (open oven door, wave some heat out,) should be about 325 or 350 tops, you don't want to burn it. You'll soon learn to stick a hand in oven, feel if it's a fast oven or a medium one. At this point cook until done. (Just short of a scorch)
NEVER put dough into a slow oven. 325, 350. THAT IS SLOW! The yeast will be killed and your dough mass will fall. You have to TORCH that sucker! BURN IT HARD SO FAST that although the yeast DIES and the puff might have fallen it can't--- for the CRAB SHELL crust hardened! And the hard crust won't let the loaf fall down. Get the picture?
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If you have those concepts, you can make bread without a recipe for
the rest of your life.
I used to make a four loaf thing, whole wheat, that had ONE WHOLE BOX OF BROWN SUGAR IN IT. Sweeter than normal bread, but drove people crazy it was so delicious toasted with a lot of cold butter.. A LB box DARK BROWN sugar OR LIGHT. Didn't matter. It also had ONE entire QUART OF MILK in it AND 2 cubes of butter melted. WHEN YOU USE MILK, you have to bring it to a frizz (almost a boil) to kill the microbes in it, say sterilization temp, then cool it to dough temp to use that milk. You couldn't put milk with all the microbes it has into it, into a two hour rising of dough. It would be problematic. Go weird on you. So you always had to sterilize the milk first. And cool it. I gave it to my agents on Valentines in cellophane with a note "To MY BREAD AND BUTTER VALENTINE" and a split of bubbly and cheese, caviar,knife. And a home made lino cut card. Open it and there's a pome.
Knowing these bread things you can grab anything and make bread. POTATO water is good liquid for bread, they use it in Germany with rye. RYE FLOUR by itself is soooooo heavy . It has to be mixed with wheat. I always cooled finished bread and immediately wrapped . bagged and froze most of it, just left ONE loaf out for that week.
FLAVORED BREADS- HOLIDAY. Dried cranberries,
scissored in half, sugar cinnamon in dough.
ITALIAN SANDWICH BREAD - Leave
the sugar out! Add a half cup of olive oil to the dough, a cup of chopped
kalamata olives, (SEEDED fer gawds' sake!) Oregano or basil leaves, tarragon.
CINNAMON RAISIN - Ezekiel makes a good one. TRICK: Add cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice to the dry ingredients. Trick: Soak the raisins, drain, dry off, add to dough after the kneading, not before! Walnuts or pecan pieces are a possibility.
ONION BREAD- Fry onions, in olive oil, cool, add to dough when you're kneading it. Reserve some for Dotting exterior of loaf.
SESAME BREAD- Toasted sesame seeds in the dough, maybe chile sesame oil or plain toasted sesame oil from the oriental market. Sesame seeds on the outside are untoasted!
BIBLE BREAD - http://www.recipezaar.com/626
http://www.razzledazzlerecipes.com/cooking/bible-bread.htm
http://www.sunshinerecipes.com/biblebread.shtml
DRY SOUP MIXES - The perfect thing for when they hold a war. (*clickable URL)
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