Sprouted Wheat Bread

Well, this is more of a baking failure than success, but it was something that was worth a try.  I had some wheat berries and wanted to try out sprouted wheat bread where you sprout the wheat, grind it up in a food processor, and basically there's your dough for making bread.  Apparently sprouting a grain is called malting and it improves the nutritional quality of food made out of the sprouted grain.

This bread does require a fair bit of planning because you need several days in which to sprout the grain.  You start with three cups of wheat berries and soak them overnight, for 12 hours.
After that, drain off the liquid, cover the bowl with a damp towel, and let the wheat sit at room temperature for about 48 hours, rinsing every 12 hours.

Now, when you're ready to make the loaf of bread, you need the following:
3 c. of wheat which you have sprouted (now it is about 6 c.)
1 tsp. yeast
2 Tbs. warm water
2 tsp. salt
2 Tbs. honey

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and combine all the ingredients.  Process in a food processor, in batches, until the wheat forms a ball.  At this point, it should be the perfect consistency. 

This is where I started having problems.  The food processor we have at the farm has a plastic blade.  It works surprisingly well for things like hummus, but for some reason, it just would not chop up the wheat.  I kept processing and processing until the wheat was slightly chopped up.  At that point, I gave up and decided to just keep going and see what happened.  Hopefully you don't have the same problem.

So, you now knead together all the dough, put it in a bowl, and let it rise for 1.5 hours.  Punch the dough down and let it rise for a second 1.5 hours.  Shape it into a loaf and put it into a greased bread pan.  Let it rise again for about an hour.  Then, bake the bread at 350F for an hour.  (Your dough shouldn't look like my picture below...)

I was most amazed to see that the loaf came out of the pan without sticking too badly.  However, it hadn't really risen in the oven, so I was slightly concerned.

In fact, it kind of looked like a brick.  Yet I still had high hopes that it would be nice inside.

But then, when I cut it open, the insides were still all sticky and pretty much the same consistency of the pre-baked dough.

Since I don't like food going to waste, I was going to just suck it up and eat the whole thing.  But then I realized that I live on a farm where any food waste can be fed to pigs and anything else organic can go into the compost pile...  And so, the pigs enjoyed a really nice treat.  I just ate the crust where it was relatively baked.  That wasn't too bad, so I am sure that if you had a good food processor you could make a successful version of this bread.