Everybody loves fresh bread – the smell of it baking, the steam that escapes when you just can’t wait to cut it, and that first bite, smeared in soft butter… If you can’t relate, I guess you should probably just stop reading.
As part of our continued quest for mostly-self-sufficiency, we’ve started to try to make all the bread we use. We upped the ante for this round, and soaked the flour for a day before baking, resulting in a pair of beautiful, delicious loaves of soaked whole wheat bread. I’ve talked about soaking before, and someday I’ll do a full post, but in a nutshell, soaking helps improve the nutrient availability and digestibility of grains and seeds. It’s not complicated, it just requires a bit of advance planning (and by advance planning, I’m talking 12 hours, not weeks, otherwise I wouldn’t bother either – 12 hours is about advanced as I can get).