interesting article about soaking grains

Great article! Thanks for the link.

It is a fact that acid causes the protein to break down in bread, causing it to become dense and heavy, as opposed to light and airy.

Sourdough has been a miserable failure for me, so I’ve done away with sour fermentation for bread. I prefer sprouting and sweet natural yeast.

Sourdough bread never turned out for me until I read Vintage Remedies Guide to Bread. Now it turns out light and yummy. A big key for me was making it a wetter dough and  using water on the counter and my hands to handle it instead of flour.

Super easy to make too. I feed the starter throughout the day, mix my dough in the evening, let it rise all night (apx 12 hours), form loaves and put in pans when I get up, rise until early afternoon (apx 6 hours), and bake.

I do sprout wheat and rye, and use them for pancakes. That’s because I can’t get kamut or barley where I live, and also because my family is very wheat-tolerant. That’s because we’re brown-rice-based in our diet, so we’re not overwhelmed with unhealthy wheat diets.

I don’t make bread from sprouted wheat. That’s because I don’t have a grain grinder. I’m getting one, eventually. It’s just that I decided to get a meat grinder first, to make healthy meatballs, etc. full of wheat bran. I use sprouted grain for pancakes, and also to add to brown rice.

Last week I put sprouted wheat in a jar with water, and it started to foam up like yeast. I think it’s the yeast from the fermentation. It smell’s like sourdough, but it’s clear and liquid. So I use that to soak brown rice, instead of cultured whey, and add sprouted grain to it. It’s dairy-free.

For bread, I follow the idea on originalyeast.blogspot.com  This website is so fantastic, because until read it, I had never heard of anything before. Natural-yeast has become quite popular on thefreshloaf.com.

I fermented raisins, water, and sugar under anaerobic conditions. It becomes a very lovely, sweet, “wine”. Later on, I can add different fruits (excluding papaya and pineapple, and other fruits that produce papain, the enzme that breaks down protein), like apples peels, grape skins, etc. and also healthy sugars like honey and jaggery. This “wine” is full of good yeast. It is not sour at all. I don’t add any wheat product, as it will become sour. Avoiding anything sour is my motto. 

It’s the weather. It’s a hot and humid country that brings out the most terribly sour part of the sourdough. In cool-weather, sourdough is appropriate. Here, it would require too much manipulation between the fridge and the counter.

From the sweet “wine”, I make a starter with flour, which is the preferment. It will ferment for several hours, then I will add flour, sweetener, and salt, and knead it into a loaf of bread. I let it rise well, then shape it, then rise again, then I bake it.The key to is use a REALLY hot oven (above 400F) and moist, sticky, dough.

Bread baked with this “original yeast” is very fluffy and rises slowly (slow -rising with natural yeast is the “traditional” way to make artisan, healthful, breads, ). I get breads tasting like ciabatta and baguettes, and even bagels.

Now that using this “natural” yeast like the pioneers did (they used ale) is so easy, I make bread with it and not with commerical yeast. So much easier that sour-soaking.