The fourth attempt to make a loaf from 100% home sprouted and milled grain turned out almost exactly like the first. The dough performed very simular to unsprouted wheat until it was baked. When the lid was taken off the pot it looked like it had good oven spring with the score opening up in a nice grin, but when it baked a little longer to brown it up the loaf collapsed over time and it did seem to shrink a bit when turned out on the cooling rack.
I had thought the problem was in the dehydrating temperature (too high) but this grain was dried at 100F using mostly a fan. Next I am going to do something counterintuitive and let the sprouting process go a little further than in the past. The thinking has been to stop the sprouting on the short side so the enzymes don’t take the process too far and denture the proteins that support the structure of a loaf. The worst that can happen will be a bad loaf.
Keep going!
Personally I have served several loaves that looked just like this. Your experimenting with the sprouting is fascinating, and shows me how much I have yet to learn, so please keep sharing this process that I (everyone) may learn.
I can see how there is a relationship here with the grain moisture, proof times, oven temp and timing, and so many variables yet to somehow construct in an order that is understandable.
Thank you Stu for all you are sharing.
Stuart, your post jogged my memory. When I tried home sprouted and milled bread, I also thought that my first failure was due to dehydrating at too high a temperature on my cheapo dehydrator with no temperature control, so for the next attempt, I air dried the sprouts at room temperature, letting weight be my guide for when they were ready to mill. I had your exact result, no difference from the first loaf.
When I stuck a thermometer into one loaf, there was an audible hiss and the loaf collapsed like a punctured balloon. It was so bizarre! I can’t remember if it was one of the sprouted loaves, but I’m pretty sure it was.
You are my hero for pursuing the elusive sprouted loaf.
The problem almost has to be in the sprouting and dehydrating procedure because when I bought the sprouted grain it performed almost like unsprouted but there are only so many variables and if they are addressed one by one something has to be found as the culprit. The last thing I tried was to continue the sprouting a little longer to the point that the sprout was almost as long as the kernel. This really did not do any different than past trials, A picture wasn’t posted because the loaf looked about like any of the others. I have to pause to travel to my niece’s wedding(900 miles and mom won’t fly) so have a week or so to think about it.
That’s what I thought too, so I bought a bag of commercial sprouted whole wheat flour and tried a loaf. It was only marginally better than what I achieved with my own sprouted flour, but still a really lousy loaf of bread. Perhaps my problem is with the process and not the sprouting, but since I used my usual method for all the sprouted trials and none of them worked, I’m flummoxed.
