Sprouted What Now??

Have you ever heard of sprouted grain bread? Yeah, me either, until Boss mentioned something about it one night whilst basking in the romantic light of my laptop. Apparently he was quite fond of a certain type of bread called "Squirlley Bread". It is a bread made with sprouted grains, which according to http://www.organicsproutedflour.net is like the best thing ever. The website has a big ol' list of health claims most of which amount to "this is both tasty and good for you!"

Boss began waxing poetic about this bread, making me desperately want to try them. At $3.00 or so a loaf I of course was skeptical (and also cheap). So rather than rush out to the Co-Op searching for this bread, I did what I now often do and said "Shit, I can do that. To Google!"

Whilst Googling, I found a recipe for making your own sprouted grain breads, the method for sprouting said grains and the tools with which to grind the resulting sprouts. I had all of the things, shit was gone get sprouted up in this joint.

The recipe for sprouting grains is located HERE  at the mother of all DIY awesomeness, Mother Earth News . The basic principle is to get the grains to sprout little tails, which means they are rehydrated and growing again. You can apparently do this with any unprocessed seeds or grains. Our first endeavor involved red wheat berries. The resulting bread was...damp? but sweet and nutty, also delightful with soup. The next goal was to make a gluten free version of this delightful buisness so we tried our hands at Quinoa sprouting.

Thing the first: Do not use the jar method that is mentioned in the Mother Earth article. Apparently with the smaller grains like quinoa  (and possibly others but for sure this particular grain) it is easier to sprout them, and drain them by laying them flat on a cookie sheet. Please see below for step by step pictorial instructions!

Step One- Pick a grain!

We picked Quinoa becuase its gluten free and  I have a fetish for feeding the starving. A cup of grains will sprout into about a cup and a halfish of sprouts and that will make one small loaf or 8 small rolls.

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Second: Soak the grains over night in a jar

(this is where the picture would go if I had taken said picture)

Third:

Drain said grains and move them to a flat surface with which to sprout

[caption id="attachment_876" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="cookie sheets are flat!"][/caption]

Fourth: rinse the grains twice a day shuffling them about so they don't congeal and make yicky mold thingys until they start to make tails. This takes about two days. There is not a photo of the tails because I only have a shitty point and shoot camera with no macro setting right now. So..here is a drawing of what they look like with tails.

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Fifth:  After they have the tails, you can grind the ever loving shit out of them. We use the meat grinding attachment for my Kitchen Aid and it works perfectly. I am sure there is an alternative method so you don't have to go buy a Kitchen Aid...but you should just go buy a Kitchen Aid because they are seriously the greatest things ever in life. I hug mine when no one is watching...Anyway...put the sprouts in the grinder and smoosh them through creating this odd, hamburgery like substance, you can add some flax, some seeds, some other stuff, whatever sounds good to you. When we did the wheat berries, we added flax but when we did the quinoa we kept it pure.

[caption id="attachment_879" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="No one knows of our secret love Kitchen Aid..."][/caption]

What Step am I on?

Smoosh the resulting pulpy stuff together to make little balls or a loaf and place on a sheet pan. We also rolled ours in sesame seeds because...why not?

[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="even his hands are handsome...*sigh*"][/caption]

I have completely lost count at this point:

Put a pan of water on the lower shelf of the oven, and the sheet pan on the upper rack. This keeps your bread from drying out. Bake at 250 degrees for...well the recipe said to do it for 2.5 hours and we found that this worked fairly well with the wheat berry bread, but was a bit too long for the quinoa. So, I am going to say check it after 2 hours and push on the top, if it is crusty but springy, its done. If its still fairly smooshy, give it another 10 minutes. There really isn't an exact time to this. The resulting nibbles look something like this:

wait...I forgot to take a picture of that too... well they look like the ones boss is rolling only cooked.

The judgement:

So, we quite liked the wheat berry bread, particularly when paired with soup. It was nothing like the squirlly bread, we think becuase they not only sprout their grains, but then dry and mill them or mix them with other grains to make flour...basically its more like bread. These loaves taste breadish, but in the case of the wheat berry bread, its very wet on the inside and hard on the outside. We may not have squeezed out enough of the water from the grains before smooshing them. As for the quinoa, we over cooked them but they had this very pleasent nutty flavor that we think would make an excellent cookie. We plan to incoporate some brown rice syrup next time and see what that is like.

Over all, sprouting: successful! Using said sprouts to make bread: Moderately successful and definately boast worthy. I mean, who do you know that is running about sprouting things and making stuff from them? Not enough people that is for sure!

Give it a try, use some other grains and let us know how it goes. What works best for you? Any alternative grinding methods? Next up, sprouted grain tortillas Oh yeah...that is happening!