“This is an interesting, crunchy, rather solid bread.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
“This is the best whole-wheat bread I’ve ever had.”
-Mike
Last night I wanted to make some sandwich bread for the week. Since I picked up some cracked wheat, or bulgur, on my last trip to the Linden Hills Co-op, I had everything on hand to make Cracked-Wheat Bread.
Here are the ingredients:
Cracked wheat has the the consistency of tiny pebbles. Or, if you would rather compare your ingredients to other foods, it has the same texture as steel-cut oats.
In hindsight, I think that Beard wants you to bring 1 1/2 cups water to a boil, stir in the cracked wheat, and cook for 10 minutes. Instead, I boiled 1 1/2 cup of water, poured it over my cracked wheat, and let it sit for 10 minutes. The downside with my hands-off method is that all of the water wasn’t absorbed, as it was supposed to be according to the recipe. I adjusted the amount of milk from 1 cup to 1/2 cup to account for the unabsorbed water from the Stacy Method, and my dough seemed to be the right consistency. However, I did have to knead in about 1/2 cup of extra flour, so I may have still ended up with too much liquid.
Regardless, my dough rose nicely and I shaped it into two loaves to fit my 9 x 5 pans. After another hour of rising, the loaves were ready for the oven.
I checked on the bread after baking for 20 minutes at 375 degrees, and the loaves were already done. They smelled so marvelous that I had to try a slice.
Cracked-Wheat Bread is by far the best whole-wheat bread I’ve made so far. The texture is absolutely amazing: light and fluffy, with a bit of crunch here and there from the cracked wheat. The flavor is hearty without being overwhelmingly dense. Whatever mistakes I made cooking the cracked wheat paid off–the resulting loaves were incredible.
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