Soaked Wheat Bread

My friend Jenny sent me a link a while back to The Elliott Homestead blog.
If you're heading toward the whole foods way of eating to any extent you should check out her site.  It's an inspiration. One step at a time though!

I found her soaked wheat bread recipe and I've been making two loaves twice a week for the past month or so. I used freshly milled flour, with a a ratio of two parts hard red wheat to one part hard white wheat. This is our favorite bread right now.

You can find the recipe here.

A Life Changing Loaf of Bread?

A naturopathic doctor I was seeing gave me a link to this recipe:

I'd been on an "elimination diet" to find out what food(s) were so negatively affecting my body. On this diet one temporarily avoids all grains (except quinoa, amaranth, millet, and a couple other ancient varieties), all dairy, nuts, refined sugars, corn, chocolate, soy, eggs, citrus fruits, alcohol, and food additives of any kind. After two or three weeks, one food at a time from the "avoid" list is systematically added, or rather, bombarded (as in, eat that food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) back in to your diet and you record you body's reactions for a day or two afterward.

Anyway, when I finally could bring back nuts and gluten free oats, she gave me this recipe and told me I was going to love it.  She was right. I've been eating it every morning for breakfast for months.

Funny, a few people I've given a sample to have really liked it and valued it's healthiness. Others hae said something to the effect of "hmmm, tastes healthy." Oh well, some just aren't ready for this.  But when, like me, you hadn't had any sugar or bread or even nuts! for weeks, this tastes very good!

Now for the recipe! It's called...

The Life-Changing Loaf of Bread, from My New Roots.

And you know what? I think that name is just about right. Pop a couple slices into the toaster.
Spread on some raw honey or jam or pesto, and let the life changing (diet-wise) begin.

Oh, and those little red things you see in my loaves are dried goji berries.  Just throw anything in.

Maple Oat Sandwich Bread

I've made this bread a number of times now and it's become my kids' favorite for sandwiches.  It works great in a bread machine, which really simplifies life for a mom, especially if you've got other fish to fry that day. Or kids. Or granola. Or yogurt or sauerkraut to try your hand at making. Yeah, I keep putting too many on my plate these days to try out.  There just isn't enough time in a day to get at all the great new foods I've been reading that I can start making at home!
One step at a time, self!

Back to the bread.
I modified an old bread machine recipe so as to work with milled flour, and what I came up with seems to be steadily coming out nicely. So I aint messing with it.

Maple Oat Sandwich Bread

Place liquid ingredients into the bread machine:

1 1/4 C + 1 TBS warm water
1/3 cup maple syrup  (I have this in my Amazon Subscribe and Save list so I save about $5 on it) 
1 TBS olive oil (not extra virgin)


Then add the dry ingredients into the bread machine:

1 1/2 cups freshly milled hard white wheat flour
1 1/2 cups freshly milled hard red wheat flour
1 cup oats
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast (I used instant yeast, but I think active dry yeast would work as well)

I rarely bake my bread in the bread machine itself. I place my the setting to "dough" o that it does the kneading and rising cycles for you.  When the machine beeps (mine takes 2 hours to complete the dough cycle) I take the dough out and knead it slightly for maybe thirty seconds or so and get it into a nice loaf shape and place it into a greased bread pan (or a non-greased USA Pan ;) and let it sit (and rise) for twenty minutes or so while until the oven heats up and bake it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

I call it a good sandwich bread because it doesn't crumble and fall apart when I cut it up.
The slices actually hold their shape. Yes!