Homemade Sourdough Ezekiel Bread!!

 When Dear One took the Christmas decorations out of the food closet the other day I remembered that I had wanted to make Ezekiel bread.  I had watched quite a few YouTube videos and was hepped up to do it.  (Ezekiel bread is supposed to be better for blood sugar.  So is sourdough bread.  By putting them together, it should make fabulous bread for blood sugar. ) We even went so far as to order some spelt berries and some kamut berries.  When I looked at the recipe for making the Ezekiel flour, I needed millet. I was certain I had laid in a supply but could not find it.  Then I remembered that it was in the closet where Dear One stored the Christmas decorations so conveniently last year.  Well, that might not have been great for me, but not having to worry about him climbing a ladder to put decorations up in the "attic" was really a big plus. So I looked, and there was the bucket of millet.

Yesterday I added the millet to the other grains in the Ezekiel-grains-for-flour container. Then ground up the flour in our blender and THEN I got out the sourdough starter and did the same as I mentioned in the sourdough post from last week. I used the same measurements as with the all-purpose flour and really did not expect much.

This starter directly out of the refrigerator looked pretty happy to me!  So I added the Ezekiel flour and other ingredients.

After a night on the counter I deemed this as doubled in bulk.

Here is our first loaf of Sourdough Ezekiel bread!!!  I am so happy with it. 

 

Sliced, you can see that there are not a lot of air spaces in the bread so it does not have the ideal sourdough texture but it does seem to have the Ezekiel bread flavor, and then some!  I would call it a success.

To make your own Ezekiel flour you need:

2 cups spelt berries

2 cups kamut berries

2 cups White wheat berries (not hard Red wheat)

1/2 cup millet

1/2 cup barley

2 Tablespoons lentils

1/3 cup dried beans--I used garbanzo beans since they were the closest to hand.  The person on YouTube who I have lost and cannot give direct credit to uses 2 Tablespoons each great northern beans, black beans, and garbanzo beans.

Mix these all together.  Grind up 3 cups of the mixture then weigh to see if it gives you the 1 pound 4 ounces needed for the sourdough Ezekiel bread.  If necessary, grind more.  I mistakenly ground up the whole batch so will be making Sourdough Ezekiel Bread again in the next couple of days.  After grinding the grains they need to be refrigerated or frozen until use since they can become rancid.  That is not something you want to use to make healthy bread...

Food Friday: Millet Loaf from Forks over Knives

For ages I have been longing to make a millet loaf.  When I was at Parkview Medical Center's Lifestyle Choices program they gave us a recipe which I made once at home. It was fabulous.  Sadly, at the time I wanted to make this a month or two ago I could not find the recipe.  So...Google being a person's best friend sometimes, I searched and found this recipe.

Because I was awake at 1:00 o'clock, and 2:00 o'clock, and 3:00 o'clock, I decided to start this recipe for a meal tomorrow.  I did some things differently, as usual...

In a medium saucepan I placed 3/4 cup uncooked millet and 2 1/2 cups of vegetable broth I had made earlier in the week.  On top of that I chopped 1 medium red onion.  Covered the pot and brought to a boil.  When the millet and onions was boiling, I stirred it, turned the heat to low and covered it.  The recipe said to let cook for 20-25 minutes until tender.  I let it cook for 25 minutes then shut off the heat.  As it turns out, (by this time it was 4:00 o'clock) it really was not "tender/cooked" but I thought possibly there was residual heat and liquid enough that they would finish the job while I went back to bed. 

At 8:30 AM when I arrived back in the kitchen I discovered that my hope on the prior situation had been vain...still not quite cooked.  (I found another recipe that has you cook the millet for 40 minutes so clearly 20-25 won't do the trick...).

In a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup I placed 1/2 cup hot water and almost 3 Tablespoons of red miso.  After stirring well I dumped in the last of the nutritional yeast in the labeled jar--about 1/3 cup, 1 1/2 teaspoons dried sage, 1 1/2 Tablespoons granulated garlic,  2 large pinches thyme, 1 teaspoon ground black pepper,  1/2 cup ketchup, and about 1/4 more hot water that I used to rinse out the ketchup bottle.  These ingredients were stirred until they were smooth (the miso took a little doing to get smooth) then poured into the saucepan of cooled cooked millet and onions.  I stirred with a spoon for a while then washed my hands again and used the old one-two to get the mixture well combined.  (The cooled millet tended to clump, which would not have been agreeable for the palate.)

When this was all mixed, I smushed it into a glass loaf pan, covered with more ketchup, and cooked it for 30 minutes, or so--because I forgot to set the timer and just guessed--then removed from the oven.  It looked good enough.  After an hour I cut out a little bit to taste.  It is okay but I am betting Dear One will prefer whatever else I put on the table for dinner.  Since I am writing this days before posting, I will be able to give a Dear One update.

The ironic thing is that I found the Parkview Millet Loaf recipe while I was going through papers in an effort to hoe out the desktop after having put the above millet loaf in the oven.  I remember the Parkview loaf as being so good I could have eaten the whole loaf in one sitting.  Well, at least mentally I could have done that.  I am now trying to get away from eating "the whole thing" in the interest of making a real change in health over the next few months.