Sprouted bread, or Essene bread
Sprouts can be dehydrated so they keep much longer, and they make a stupefantastic snack — I call it elvish bread 🙂
The tricks I’ve learned:
- Make the bread very thin: it helps it dehydrate evenly.
- Add mucilaginous seeds so the other ingredients stick together (flax, chia, buckwheat). Not essential.
- Mix in grated roots — they work like straw in natural building, binding everything (carrot, parsnip, celeriac).
- Add spices to taste, or sweeteners.
With that in mind, I mostly use activated oilseeds (just soaked: sunflower seeds, walnuts, almonds, sesame, hazelnuts) or sprouted cereals: wheat, oats, barley, rye, millet (3 days sprouting — at minimum the shoot should be as long as the grain, which tells you, just as in brewing, that the starch has turned into simple sugars).
You can use other sprouts too, such as pulses, or onion, garlic or radish, which give it a peppery kick — or mix many varieties of seed.
There is a sprouted bread called Ezekiel, after the passage in the Bible, Ezekiel 4:9: «Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof; according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days, shalt thou eat thereof.»
I use a lot of sunflower seeds, sesame and walnuts. I soak them overnight in a container — they can be mixed — and in another container I put a little water (not much, because we will use this water) with the mucilaginous seeds. I usually use chia, which releases its mucilage very fast: about 10 minutes in a glass, stirring with a spoon, is enough.
Drain the seeds through a sieve. With the mucilaginous ones you won’t need to, as they’ll already be a firmer mass.
Then crush or grind those seeds and mix them with the mucilaginous ones. You get a thick paste that would already be enough to make the bread. Let’s call this the seed dough.
I like to grate carrot in so it binds better and the texture comes out softer. Mix it all together and add the spices.
As for spices, for savoury versions you can add salt, turmeric, dill, oregano, cumin… this is the experimenting part.
I like making them sweet too, adding honey, cacao, dried fruit (figs, dates) or raw fruit purées. I love it with blueberry and apple, or banana and mango…
Once the dough is mixed we need to dehydrate it, and a dehydrator is very handy here — electric (24 hours) or solar (2 days). The key is to lay down baking paper so it doesn’t stick, and to spread the dough very thin, half a centimetre at most; it will shrink as it dries. You can also use thin vegetable slices as a base instead of paper — I usually use cabbage or courgette.
A mesh in the sun would do, with another mesh over it to protect from insects and birds. The Essenes would lay it on a stone one day and turn it over the next…
The Essenes were contemporaries of Jesus Christ, and some historians say Jesus was an Essene — which would make the bread of the Last Supper a sprouted bread.
They can keep for over a year. With oilseeds, because of their oils, they can turn rancid after 3 months — although I have eaten the blueberry one at over 2 years old and it was in perfect condition. It must be the antioxidants in the blueberry.
