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This is 100% of whole wheat grain milled at home. The grain is soft white Spring wheat of moderate protein value. It does not behave the exact same way as hard red Winter wheat, which I prefer.
I'm disappointed in 100% of whole wheat loaves because they simply do not rise in the way we expect when a considerable percentage of refined flour is included with the dough.
Having said that I must add this is among the most delicious bread I have ever tasted, and I do believe this is the bread of history. This is the bread pictured on the walls of numberless ancient Egyptian tombs in a wide variety of shapes. See Gardiner's hieroglyphic sign chart section X 1-8. (Incidentally, after 100 years of concurrence that first sign, the small semicircle that stands for the phonetic "t", it is finally being disputed as representing a small loaf of bread due to it usually being painted black when the walls are painted with a full palette of colors. It is now thought by some present-day experts to represent the primordial mound. Colors do mean something.) But this is all a little bit off the point.
It's impossible for me to believe the ancients had any more success than I do in getting loaves to rise much more than this, given their mills were more rudimentary and their yeast cultures were no different. There is no way they could have kneaded the dough as thoroughly as I can do right here at home with a machine that can work far beyond what any person could do by hand. I'm saying throughout history right up to modern era, it was not possible to mill grain as finely or work the dough more thoroughly than I can do right here at home. That's my story, and I'm stickin' with it.
In fact I think damage to the teeth of ancient people shows that it was not uncommon for tiny stones to make their way into the dough, being abraded by the mill stones used to crush the grain, either huge ones or small home types. Can you imagine what a drag that must have been, and how coarse their standard bread must have been? I'm certain if they were presented with a loaf of, say, Wonder bread, they wouldn't even consider it to be bread at all.
I only got as far as I have because I didn't add salt. My second failure, pictured below, taught me that salt was retarding the progress of the yeast and bacteria. One way to avoid that is to add the salt later after the organisms have multiplied but that risks forgetting it altogether which I've done several times, and it deflates the loaves, which isn't usually a problem unless it took a day to rise the first time, in which case I'm reticent to start over.
Even without salt, I almost didn't bake this salt-less loaf pictured above because it failed to rise to the top of the bread pans which would have doubled its size. It rose less than double. It rises fine as a wet sponge in a jar, but hardly rises at all as a dough with much more weight bearing down on it, flattening it. The yeast really does need a lot of liquid to multiply effectively. There was no oven-rise either as expected with refined flour loaves.
The loaf was not fermented either, save for the unusually long period it took to proof.
1 comment:
The crumb looks nice and moist, even if it isn't as poofy as you would have liked. It kind of reminds me of a very dense bread I had while I lived in Denmark, made from rye and whole wheat. It too was sliced very thin, and it had wheat kernels (I think) in it for textural appeal. It made very tasty, but somewhat delicate, open-face sandwiches. We used it for pretty much all our bread needs.
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