Whole-Grain Wheat Bread - The Crumbs

Whole-Grain Wheat Bread - The Crumbs

As I travelled the world, spending time with many modest income families, I noticed that very little food went to waste. Bread was never wasted. If the bread became stale, it was turned into bread crumbs. These bread crumbs came into future meals in a wide range of ways. The bread crumbs became a basic ingredient in dishes such as rissoles and meatloaf. See earlier posts, starting with Australian Outback Rissoles (Oct. 25, 2010). The wide use of bread crumbs includes: a stuffing ingredient in stuffed peppers, a thickener for soups, an ingredient in the coating of fish and chicken before frying, a topping ingredient for casseroles and a part of the coating for baked vegetables. If you have whole-grain wheat bread, you have access to one of the tastiest and healthiest forms of bread crumbs. Some great uses for these whole-grain bread crumbs follow.

Crumb-Coated Roasted Potatoes

We grow and eat our own red-skinned potatoes. With the aid of a root cellar, these potatoes are available for most of the year.

Ingredients

 2 pounds red-skinned potatoes

1 cup whole-wheat bread crumbs

1/2 cup olive oil

4 tablespoons grated Romano or Parmesan cheese

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pepper

2 teaspoons dried parsley

Prepare the bread crumbs. I use a hand meat-grinder. For grinding bread crumbs the grinder is fast and  easy. I break the bread into 1 inch pieces and dry the pieces in a 200 degree oven for about 60 minutes. If the bread is dry, the bread crumbs will store well in a sealed mason jar.

These hand meat-grinders are great for many things. A safety note: this is a one-person job. The person placing the bread pieces in the hopper should be the same person turning the handle. This way, one person cannot grind another person's finger.

My grandmother used a rolling pin to crush the dry bread into crumbs. That was certainly a quick and safe way to make bread crumbs.

Cut the potatoes into 1/2 inch thick slices and toss them in a bowl with the olive oil until the potatoes are well coated. Place all the ingredients, except the potatoes, in a bowl and mix them well. Add the potatoes to the bowl and mix well until the potatoes are thickly coated.

Rub the baking pan with olive oil, add the potato slices, and bake in an oven preheated to 400. Check the potatoes for tenderness. They should be browned and cooked in about 30 minutes.

This coating recipe can be used for other vegetables, including squash, onions and carrots.

Whole-Grain Wheat Bread

Whole-Grain Wheat Bread 

This bread is 100% whole grain and very tasty as well as full of nutrients. Store-bought whole-wheat bread is mostly white flour with a modest amount of the whole grain. To get the complete whole grain, you may have to mill the grain yourself. First select the wheat. I use red wheat.

I find the best way to acquire the red wheat is in
45 lb. buckets that cost about 25 US dollars per bucket. Given the national  interest in emergency or "prepper" food supplies, these buckets are easy to find online or locally in many communities. I get mine from a "big box" local grocery store. I have a hand wheat grinder and an electric grinder. You have to be very hungry to use a hand grinder. The hand grinder will work in emergencies when the electricity has failed.

Ingredients

This will make two loaves.

A very basic bread recipe uses warm water,  yeast, and flour. To be more tasty, add some salt,  sweetener, and oil or butter. See the reference to "damper" at the end of this post.

I use:

4 cups of hot water, not boiling. I take it from the hot faucet in the kitchen sink. You need the warm water to make the yeast work. Boiling water poured on the yeast will kill live, active yeast. Ensuring a warm temperature for the yeast when Grandma Hofmeister was cooking was not a major concern in the Queensland Outback. If it was 105 degrees F. outside and the kitchen stove was burning wood, the temperature was great for keeping the yeast active.

1/2 cup of olive oil for the bread mixture, 1 tablespoon for rubbing the inside of each of the two baking pans, and 2 tablespoons for basting the crust of each of loaf of bread after it is cooked.

For the sweetener  I use a 1/4 cup of honey and a 1/4 cup of molasses, mixed.

1 tablespoon of sea salt

8 cups of whole-grain flour.

2 dry active-yeast packets. These sealed packets contain a tablespoon each. Using these sealed packets usually means the yeast is alive and active. When time is an issue the outback australians used self-raising ("self-rising" in Australian) flour. See damper recipes below.

Take the bowl off the mixer and include every ingredient except the flour and yeast. Stir with a large spoon. Add half the flour (about four cups). Place the bowl on the mixer and gently stir until the hot water is well mixed. Then add the yeast and keep mixing slowly. This will be a very sticky mixture. You need to add more flour slowly, about a half cup at a time. Stop adding flour and stop mixing when the mixture stops sticking to the mixing bowl. There should be very little flour left.

Take the mixing bowl off the mixer and cover with a paper towel and a small cutting board to hold the paper towel in place. Let the mixture rise for 45 minutes. The dough should have risen noticeably.

Place the bowl back on the mixer and mix slowly for about a minute. This should reduce the mixture. Remove the bowl from the mixer and place the dough on a whole-grain, flour-covered cutting board. Knead the mixture into a roll and cut into halves. Knead each half for a few minutes and place in a baking pan which has been rubbed inside with olive oil to prevent loaves from sticking to the pans.

Preheat your oven to 400, set back to 350 and cook the loaves for 35 to 40 minutes.

Remove loaves from the oven and baste the top of each loaf with olive oil. This will ensure the loaves do not develop a heavy dry crust that will limit sandwich making.

Immediately remove the loaves from the pans and set them out for at least 30 minutes before eating. After 60 minutes you may wrap each loaf with foil and store in a cool place, but not in a refrigerator. The refrigerator will change the texture. The loaves will dry out quickly if not wrapped in foil or waxed paper. Remember there are no artifical preservatives in these loaves, so enjoy the bread within a day or two. The bread is still quite tasty for a week if kept well wrapped in foil.

Some Great Additions - Apples and Raisins

If you wish to vary the basic recipe listed above, there are two great tasty and healthy additions, apples and raisins.  I prefer to add three cups of my bottled cinnamon apples for each loaf. Some will peel and chop the raw apples and add three cups of chopped apples and 3 teaspoons of cinnamon per loaf. To make the raisin loaves, add three cups of raisins per loaf. I like to soak my raisins in dark rum overnight. This is still a healthy addition. The alcohol evaporates during the cooking, but the great rum taste does not. These additions are included in the basic mixture before the yeast is added.

Damper - The Outback Bread

The Aussie-info web site Noted:

In colonial Australia, stockmen developed the technique of making damper out of necessity. Often away from home for weeks with just a camp fire to cook on and only sacks of flour as provisions, a basic staple bread evolved. It was originally made with flour and water and a good pinch of salt, kneaded, shaped into a round, and baked in the ashes of the campfire or open fireplace. It was eaten with pieces of fried, dried meat, sometimes spread with golden syrup, but always with billy tea or maybe a swig of rum.

Today it is made with milk and self-rising flour. Salt is optional.

BUSH DAMPER

3 cups of self-rising flour
1/2 teaspoon salt (optional)
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water

Sift flour and salt into a bowl, rub in butter until mixture resembles fine crumbs.
Make a well in the centre, add the combined milk and water, mix lightly with a knife until dough leaves sides of bowl.
Gently knead on a lightly floured surface, and then shape into a round and place on a greased oven tray. Pat into a round 15-16 cm (6-6 1/2 inch) diameter.
With sharp knife, cut two slits across dough like a cross, approximately 1cm (1/2in) deep.
Brush top of dough with milk.
Sift a little extra flour over dough.
Bake in a hot oven for 10 minutes, or until golden brown.
Reduce heat to moderate and bake another 20 minutes.
Best eaten the day it is made.

Baking Bread in Tough Times

Given that we started with a reference to emergency food preparation, all the above-listed suggestions for bread making can be done without the typical home oven, be it gas or electric. You will need a 12-inch Dutch Oven (in Australia we call them Camp Ovens). The 12-inch Dutch Oven is the perfect fit  for the standard bread loaf pan.

The following photo from www.aussiecampovencook.com says it all. If you use a smaller 8-inch Dutch Oven then the Dutch Oven would serve as both the loaf pan and the oven.

Part 2 is the next post - What to do with old dry bread?

Meat Pies

Meat Pie Filling.  

1/2 cup olive oil

1 1/2 lbs lean ground beef

1 1/2 lbs lean ground turkey

6 bacon slices - thick and peppered - cut into 1 inch pieces  

1 can condensed cream of Mushroom soup with garlic

1 can condensed French onion soup

2 cups chopped carrots

1 can peas

2 cups of chopped asparagus

1 can diced Italian tomatoes

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon pepper

2 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce

2 teaspoons dried basil

1 teaspoon garlic powder

Brown bacon in a large frying pan with olive oil.

Add beef and brown.

Add turkey and brown.

Add rest of ingredients, stir well and bake for an hour at 250. Leave lid off to reduce water content and thicken the mixture. If there is too much liquid in mixture, add two tablespoons of potato flakes.

This should make at least 8 small (mini) pies or two large meat pies. This recipe was designed to taste great and be more healthy than my usual meat pie recipes.

I found the following mini pie maker the best and fastest way to make a wide range of meat and fruit pies. The pie maker is typically available for about 80 US dollars online through folks like Amazon.

Breville BPI640XL Personal Pie Maker

• Four pie molds with a 4-inch diameter
• Edge crimper seals the pie with decorative trim
• Locking latch
• Easy clean non-stick surface
• Included accessories: pastry cutter and pastry press

I do not usually endorse cooking appliances, however this brand has an Australian history.

Breville is a maker of small kitchen appliances, founded in Sydney, Australia, in 1932. They created the original sandwich toaster. The product was a huge success upon its launch in Australia in 1974, selling 400,000 units in its first year and making the Breville brand a household name in Australia. Soon after, the Breville toasted sandwich maker was launched in New Zealand and Great Britain where it met with similar success. The name became synonymous with such devices – to the point where “Breville” has become the generic word for a sandwich toaster, and often the toasted sandwich itself, in much the same way that “Hoover” is associated with the vacuum cleaner.

If you do not have this Breville pie maker you would bake the typical 9 inch pie at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes.  Given that small pies are a very portable food item and often spend considerable time out of a refrigerator before eaten, make sure the pie mixture is well cooked before it becomes a part of the pie.

For related posts see:

a. The Pie Iron Meat Pie - Dec. 24 2010.
b. Cornish Pasties - Oct. 31 2010.

My first experience in the making of meat pies was helping Grandma Hofmeister in her wood cooking stove kitchen in outback Queensland. The hand turned meat grinder was set up on the kitchen table and grandma collected all the beef related leftovers and I operated the grinder to generate the "minced" beef that went into the meat pie mixture. The house had a wood stove, no electricity and no indoor plumbing.

My thanks to my friend Chad for helping in the field testing of recipes. Chad also supplied the photo of the pie and peas.