Buckwheat and Millet Bread
Since I’ve been traveling a bit for the holidays I had to put the wild starter in the refrigerator. This means that it’ll be a day or two before I get it going again. So because I needed a loaf of bread for this week’s lunches, I had to use regular yeast. I also decided to enrich it a bit to see what effect, if any, it had on the taste and texture of the bread. My enricher of choice was whey. It’s cheap and works well in my pizza dough. I have noticed over the years that many books use non-instant powdered milk, but the stuff is so damn expensive, I had to use something else.
Here’s today’s recipe:
1 1/2 c of potato starch 1 egg
1 c of millet about 2 cups of warm water
1 c buckwheat
1/2 c millet groats
1/3 c whey
1 /2 salt
3 t. xanthan gum
2 T dark brown sugar
1 1/2 T yeast
In keeping with my simple bread ideal, I combined the dry ingredients and then added the beaten egg and water to the mix. I mixed it up by hand for a few minutes and let it rest for about 10 minutes while I prepped the pan with parchment and spray oil. I formed the loaf in the prepared pan and let it rise (it’s amazing how much faster standard yeast rises than wild yeast btw). Here’s it rising:
I’ll return when I can slice it and eat it. At least it looks promising…
Okay, so I have returned. A few observations:
1) It appears as though the whey made the bread have a very tiny crumb
2) It doesn’t seem to taste any better, so why add it?
3) The bread feels drier, like it’s going to go stale faster.
Now I don’t know if any of these observations are due to they whey. It just seems that way. But since I am trying to have a simple bread, I am going to leave it out next time. I also think that I prefer the slight stickiness of non-enriched bread, because it feels softer and doesn’t go stale as fast.
It also may very well be that I have grown to actually like the different grains required in gluten-free baking and appreciate their flavor as opposed to being angry at them for not tasting like wheat. Then again, I don’t even remember what wheat tasted like or it tasting like much at all.
GF baking is yet another situation where we should be grateful for the abundant food we can eat, instead of complaining about what we cannot eat. This, like so many other things in life, is easier said than done.
~Sarah
