About love

Love is when an eight-year old French girl decides to make a Pithiviers (an almond cake) for her family. She has baked Pithiviers before and is confident it will come out well. So confident that she forgets to use flour. Butter goes in and ground almonds and sugar and who can remember what else but what comes out of the oven is a flat disk. At the end of dinner that night, the so-called Pithiviers is solemnly brought out and sliced. But the smell and taste are off-putting (mushroomy in fact, probably because of the baking powder) and nobody is actually able to eat more than one bite of his or her share except the little girl's dad who pronounces the sorry cake the best flourless Pithiviers he has ever had.
Love is when you bake a brioche for your Valentine and you make it a hundred percent whole wheat to compensate for all the butter you used that he shouldn't be eating and you bungle the shaping because really you never learned how to make a brioche à tête like the ones you see all over Paris and because of the poor shaping, it doesn't rise as well as it should but you bake it anyway and when you slice it open to reveal a somewhat under-baked center, your Valentine says there is nothing wrong with your brioche that a little browning in the toaster won't fix.
Love is a lot like gluten in bread dough: it binds us together, yet leaves enough breathing space around each of us that we can grow and change and still be part of a whole. In the face of the relentless waves of violence, ugliness, intolerance, and plain old stupidity that are threatening to sweep us under, the humble metaphor is reason enough to keep on baking.
Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Sprouting all over!

Keith Giusto's Power Bread is sprouting fast. After Anne-Laure and Jeremy, now Marjorie had a whirl at it and made the gorgeous loaf that you see above. Here is what she has to say about the experience: "I just took my bread out from the oven. It is cooling on my kitchen counter. I found the dough was very easy to handle and I kept it in the refrigerator overnight. I took it out in the morning and let it rest for two hours before I baked the bread. when I tried to put the bread on my baking stone, it slipped off my hand. At least it did not drop to the floor but it did deflate it a bit. I baked with a lid (roaster) on for 30 minutes then 25 minutes without the cover. It did not had the oven spring. I hope to get back to the original height". Well done, Marjorie, and thanks for the feedback!

Freshly baked by my niece Anne-Laure...

(all the pictures in this post were taken by Anne-Laure)

Si vous préférez lire ce billet en français, cliquer ici

...I am happy to introduce these beautiful sprouted wheat loaves fashioned after Keith Giusto's power bread.
Anne-Laure has had her eye on this bread from the moment she saw it on Farine and she asked me for the formula. I sent it to her and she tried her hand at it with unmitigated success! Here is the message she sent me (my translation): "I bought a bag of organic sproutable wheat. Using the indicated wheat/water ratio (100/180), I put 250 g grains in 450 g tap water Friday at around 3 PM. The temperature in the kitchen was about 20 t0 23 degrees Celsius (68 to 73 F). I agitated the water 3 or 4 times a day. Sunday morning, around 10 AM, when I pressed a grain between thumb and forefinger, white matter came out. The grain was ready!"

"I washed the grain as indicated by Keith (it was very clean), then I strained it."

"My 250 g dry grains produced 400 g strained sprouted wheat. I ran all of it through the meat grinder with no problem"...

"...then I put half of it in the freezer for next time. I used the other half to make Keith's dough omitting raisins, honey, gluten, and toasted walnuts and almonds (to try and limit the calories) ."

Ingredients:

• 200 g ground sprouted wheat
• 300 g unbleached all-purpose flour
• 200 g water
• 1/3 cube of instant yeast 
• 11 g salt
• 30 g apple juice
• 125 g liquid starter (hydration: 100%)

Method: "I mixed everything by hand in a big bowl, then directly on the counter. I had to add a fistful of flour as the dough was really very wet. I set it to ferment until 3 PM, then I shaped it into two batards which proofed until approximately 4:30 PM."

"I baked the batards in a 240 C/464 F oven for 25 minutes, then for 5 minutes at 180 C/356 F. I find the resulting loaves very tasty and very handsome. I will make this bread over and over. Next time, though, I'll sprout 1 kg of grains in one shot. If you'd like to know why you shouldn't let the wheat oversprout, click here".

Thank you, Anne-Laure, for being the first one to bake this bread from Farine's post on Keith Giusto's power bread as well as for this lively description of your experience.
It sounds like you had a fun time making this dough and I would love to try it too. But I don't have a meat grinder (yet), so it'll have to wait. Meanwhile I will feast on your pictures!

Keith Giusto's power bread

This bread is one of Keith Giusto's favorites and a big seller in his bakery, Full Circle Baking Company in Petaluma. Made with sprouted wheat, it requires some serious advance planning since you have to soak the grain for 48 hours and wash it carefully before milling and using it.
Why use sprouted wheat? Because sprouting "liberates" the sweet flavor of the kernel and, more importantly still, because it triggers the breakdown of the nutrients it contains, transforming large molecules in smaller ones more easily absorbed by the body.

Before (top) and after (bottom) sprouting

Two considerations come into play when selecting wheat for sprouting: first, it is essential to purchase clean wheat from a reliable source because dirty wheat may contain insects, mouse droppings, or worse and may also contain little stones which might find their way into the bread and from there into someone's mouth and break a tooth (it could also seriously damage the milling machine); secondly, it is very important to purchase gluten-rich wheat (hard white winter wheat or dark Northern spring wheat) since, once sprouted and milled, it will replace a good proportion of the flour in the dough.
When getting ready to sprout (48 hours before mixing the dough), put the kernels of wheat in a big bucket or bowl (depending on how much you are sprouting) and use 180% water for 100% wheat. Agitate the seeds vigorously to make sure every kernel is in contact with water. Repeat 3 or 4 times a day. In warm weather, change the water everyday.
After 48 hours, if you press on a kernel, white matter (the endosperm) will come out. The wheat is ready. If you see even the beginning of the germ, then it is too late and the wheat cannot replace part of the flour in the dough. So watch it carefully on the second day.

The next step - washing the wheat - is extremely important. The soaking water is yellowish (or reddish) and murky and it stinks (a sign that fermentation has started). It needs to be completely rinsed out. Place the seeds in a colander (at SFBI, we used a perforated bucket) and wash. The wheat is clean when the rinsing water comes out clear and bubble-free).

Once clean and drained (at this point, you can taste it and discover its deliciously nutty flavor), the wheat is milled. A meat grinder can be used if you have one. If using a food-processor, be sure to make really small batches as the sprouted wheat is quite dense and the machine might conk out.

If not used immediately, the milled wheat needs to be kept in the refrigerator where it'll stay good for a couple of days. Since the sprouting and milling process is rather cumbersome, it might be a good idea to make a big batch (for instance, four times the amount you need) and freeze the milled grain in 1-lb or 1-kg bags. When ready to use, be sure to thaw it well though as the mass becomes very stiff and would break the hook of the mixer if not completely thawed.
The milled grain is added to the liquid ingredients (water, levain, fruit juice if using) and the dough is mixed on 1st speed until incorporated, then the dry ingredients go in (flour, yeast, gluten if using), etc. It is particularly important not to add all of the water indicated in the formula as the milled grain retains a lot of it and the dough might be too wet.

I will not post the actual recipe today as I would need to recalculate the weight of all the ingredients for home use (at SFBI, we made 25 kg of power bread dough). But I will post it when I make the bread at home. 
The loaf can be scored as follows...

...and come out like this...

Or it can be shaped and scored as Lumi, one of our classmates, prefers it...

We used stiff levain, sprouted grain, bread flour, dry yeast, salt, raisins juice, raisins and toaste walnuts and almonds in the dough.

The bread is delicious and keeps very well. At home I may try to reproduce it without the raisins (I love their sweetness but hate the calories they add to each slice) and halve the amount of nuts.
The big question though isn't the ingredients I'll use. As I don't have a meat grinder, it is really whether or not I'll be able to mill the grain in my food-processor. There is only one way to find out... Stay tuned! Related story: Freshly Baked by my Niece Anne-Laure