Munchie Monday: Sprouted Wheat Sourdough Bread

Well, the sourdough starter was successful!!

This is what the starter looks like tonight after five days of daily feedings.  See the nice bubbles?!  That means the bugs are happy inside the starter.  I guess I can put it in the refrigerator now.

This morning I took a chance on the sourdough starter actually being in good working order because the sprouting wheat needed to be used.  Well, at least I thought it did.  Carolyn Robinson from New Zealand who has a YouTube channel gave me the inspiration.  That coupled with several other videos/speeches on how beneficial sprouted wheat flour is for our bodies as opposed to just regular whole wheat flour...well, I had to try it.

Having tried sprouting the hard white wheat in the past and being unsuccessful, I decided to look at it a different way.  I could only see a few tiny TINY maybe possibly white sprouts on a few grains of wheat, BUT it was all nice and soft looking so I decided it must be sprouted.  I did not dare let it sit out any longer, afraid of having it spoil.

So, I more or less followed Carolyn's plan:  I had put 1 1/2 cups of wheat berries in the quart jar and let them work all week.  This morning I rinsed them one last time and put them in my blender. I put in enough water to come less than one-quarter inch above the sprouts then let it blend until it was all a big old bunch of slurry.

After pouring the slurry into a large glass bowl I added 2 teaspoons of coarse salt, 1 teaspoon of molasses, and about 4 cups of flour.  I think Carolyn used a little less flour but I needed 4 cups...plus I was using white flour here because I did not have any more wheat ground. I will fix that tomorrow...Probably with whole wheat flour I would have needed less flour than the white.

After stirring this until it was well mixed together, I covered it with a clean cloth and let it rise for six hours.  It looked pretty good at 6 hours so I took out our "bun pans", sprayed them, then used the ice cream scoop to portion out the dough into each of the twelve wells, covered them and let them start rising for their next six hours.  About four hours into the rise, the power went out in a big thunderstorm!!  That was going to be a really big bummer if the bread was ready to bake but I could not get the oven started.  NOTE TO SELF:  buy matches so you can start the oven and the burners which all have electric ignition!!  Also lanterns. Also a generator.

After four hours the power came back on.  IMMEDIATELY I started the oven going then put the pans in the oven.  It turned out that they took no hurt at all.  I baked them at 350 degrees F. for 30 minutes.

These are the rolls:

They are pretty good, if I do say so myself.  We will see how much difference the sprouted wheat made when I check my blood sugar in the morning!  I ate two and a half of these rolls.  With black raspberry all fruit jam on them.  I could probably have stood there and wolfed down another one or two of them but I managed to walk away.