Skip to main content

From A Year in Bread : Honey Wheatberry


I have decided to skip August in my journey through a year in bread and go straight to September. So I zip past the quick breads made with baking powder and what not, and land in the midst of whole grain breads. I picked Beth's Honey Wheatberry bread - I would claim that would have been my choice anyway but the fact is that was the only one I had all the ingredients for.

Beth made this bread to recreate the magic of Oroweat Honey Wheat Berry Bread. But there's a catch : the Oroweat bread was made with cracked wheat not wheatberries. So Bombay Foodie's bread is made with cracked wheat too.

Beth's original recipe is for two large loaves. What follows is 1/3rd of this original, enough for my shorter loaf. Pour 2/3 cup boiling water over 1/4 cup cracked wheat. Let rest for an hour for the wheat to fluff up and soften. To this, add 1/4 cup milk, 1/3 cup whole wheat flour and a tsp of yeast. Mix and set aside for 15-20 minutes until the mixture starts to bubble up. Add a tbsp each of butter and honey, then add enough plain flour to form a dough. Let it rest for 10 minutes, then sprinkle a tsp of salt and knead until the dough is smooth. I always need to add more flour at this stage to keep the dough from sticking.

Put the dough in a bowl, cover and let rise until doubled. I use straight plastic containers so it's easy to see when the doubling happens. Once the rise in done, shape the dough into a loaf, put it in a greased loaf pan and let rise again until doubled.

In the meantime, preheat oven to 175C. Bake bread for 45 minutes or until brown. If you want perfect slices for sandwiches, this needs to cool for at least an hour. If not, just tear chunks of warm bread and you will love it with butter.

Comments

bluespriite said…
Most impressed.. baking bread and that too in this infernal heat (assuming you do live in Mumbai) is quite the work of champions. Though makes me want to try it.
Bombay Foodie said…
bluespriite - I do live in Mumbai. But I bake all my bread, since I really can't stand the supermarket quality.
Pinky said…
Hi Simran

Nice bread , even i hav jst started baking , & learning the tricks.is dalia n broken wheat the same? & do u have a recipe for a simple white loaf which u hav tried & which has come good coz i had tried & it was a disaster.
Bombay Foodie said…
Pinky - Dalia and broken wheat are the same.

I've tried a simple white loaf in March as part of my "A Year in Bread" challenge. Here's the link: http://foodiezone.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-year-in-bread-white-sandwich-loaf.html
pinky said…
Hi Simran

I did try out the white bread loaf today & it came out icely. my earlier white bread were disasters.This had a nice crust & a very soft texture inside. jst one thing i was not able to cut into nice slices , how u do u slice the bread?
Bharti said…
What a lovely loaf. tearing it apart sounds good.
Bergamot said…
The bread looks just great.
CurryLeaf said…
Wow.I was wondering how you got wheatberries.That was the only reason I avoided it.Cracked wheat bread is great.

Popular posts from this blog

Mystery Fruit

This only happened a few times every year, just when the rainy season kicked in. A street hawker will come by, straw basket on head. He will yell "kaul chapni" and I will run out to buy a bundle of these. Stuck together like flowers, they looked like a bouquet. Every hole contains a little fruit. You break out the package, peel the tiny fruit that pops out and eat it. Done slowly, it can take you an hour to eat an head. Or did, when I was about 12 years old. That was the last time I saw this fruit. I've never seen it again, didn't even know what it was called or where it came from. Three weeks back, Vikram Doctor wrote about a store in Khar that sells Sindhi foods. He described this fruit and I knew it came from my vivid childhood memories. And finally, I knew we were talking about lotus fruit. Now talk about coincidences. Last weekend, I was passing by a lane in Bandra and for the first time in many, many years I saw the straw basket filled with my mytery fru

Of Brun and Bun Maska

There is more to Bombay's breads than the pao that goes into pao bhaji and vada pao. There's Brun. and there's bun. We will get there. First, you have to get to know the city's Parsis. And Iranis, who are also Zoroastrians, but came to city a little later, in the late 19th or early 20th century. And when they came, they brought with them these little cafes that dot the city. I am no expert on Irani chai cafes. And I can't tell you whether Yazdani Bakery will provide you the best experience or Kyani's. But I can tell you a few things you need to ignore when you get there. Appearances don't matter; so ignore the fact that the marble/glass top tables and the wooden chairs look a bit dilapidated. Also ignore the rundown look the place sports. Instead, get yourself settled. And order a bun muska. This one's familiar to you as a first cousin of the soft hamburger bun. It's similar, but just a tad bit sweeter. Maska, of course, is the generous dollop o

Announcing AWED : Britain

Before I ate my first Italian wood fired pizza, before I went to that swanky Japanese sushi bar for the first time, or the neighborhood Chinese joint, the first non-Indian cuisine I encountered was British. Not real food, mind you, but the tempting, oh so delicious descriptions in my favorite novels. From Enid Blyton to Jane Austen to P.G. Wodehouse, every favorite character in every favorite novel seems to have food on their mind. Yes, British food gets ridiculed a lot. But forget their main course dishes for now, and think of the full English breakfast and the elegant afternoon teas. Then try imagining the world without cucumber sandwiches or potato chips and you will realize you can't do without British food. Which is why when I saw that DK was looking for hosts for her monthly event AWED (A Worldly Epicurean's Delight) and there has never been a British AWED, I promptly signed up. The rules are simple really: Make any vegetarian or vegan British dish (eggs are