Ultra delicious whole grain bread

A No-knead Sourdough Bread

The Inspiration

Not very many bakeries in Italy make really grainy bread so while travelling there, I started buying packaged German bread like this in grocery stores.

100% whole grain, pre-sliced bread from Bavaria 

It's 100% whole grain, full of flavour, and pre-sliced. It's wonderful toasted.  

Toasted and topped with gorgonzola and Frutti di Bosco jam 

  

Once I was back home I was determined to create something similar. I was never satisfied with 100% whole grain that I made but this bread proved that it could be done. 

I experimented for months before I had a recipe that I was happy with and I learned a few tricks in the process. The first is to use whole grain meal, not whole grain flour. The second is to use rolled oats and parchment paper to handle the sticky dough. The third is to bake it in pans at low temperature.

My standard way of making bread is a long, slow ferment using a pinch of instant yeast to start the ferment and this is no exception. You could use an existing starter instead but this recipe is more predictable, doesn't require a starter and produces a sour dough.
  

I start the dough as a “biga” (all the water and about ½ of the grain) and let it sit for a few days, then add the rest of the dry ingredients on baking day. This long ferment isn't entirely necessary but it develops more flavour. You can shorten the ferment time by using more yeast as described below. It makes a dense loaf packed with flavour. I recommend slicing it thinly and toasting it. For the utmost savoury effect, I brush the thin toast with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkle a little salt on top.

Tools and ingredients

You’ll need two 9 inch loaf pans and parchment paper. You can get by without non-stick pans but I do recommend parchment paper. I mix the dough with a heavy duty silicone spatula but a sturdy spoon will work. Lastly, you’ll need a sturdy and sharp bread knife to slice this bread thinly.

Cut two pieces of parchment paper so that you can sling the dough into your bread pans. It should fit into the bottom of the pan and the sides should extend above the sides of the pan as in the photo below.  

Cut parchment paper to cover the bottom and extend beyond the sides 

I didn't try to make this a no-knead recipe but that's the way it evolved. The problem is that 100% whole grain is extremely hard to knead by hand. However, by using meal instead of flour, I found that I could MIX the dough without kneading right before the final-rise with no kneading required! 

I've used various combinations of wheat, spelt, rye, millet, and corn with similarly good results. I grind my own grain but multigrain cereal from the bulk bin works well. The texture of the grain affects the stiffness of the dough. The finer the meal, the stiffer the dough will be. The best texture is between (or a blend of) the ones in the lower left and lower right in the photo below. 

Seeds and grains

The grind at the bottom centre of the photo is what I like for this recipe. It has a combination of coarse and fine particles but no flour.   

Pat's Ultragrain Bread recipe

Makes two loaves in 9” long loaf pans, about 1150 grams each.

First day

4-½ cups water at room temperature

A big pinch of instant yeast, the size of a pea, or up to 1/8 tsp if you want to speed it up

4-½ cups whole grain meal

Dissolve yeast, add the grain, mix thoroughly, cover with something that will prevent drying (not cloth). Let it sit at room temperature for 2 to 3 days depending on how much you want it to ferment and how warm your kitchen is.

It’s not essential but you can mix the dough once a day to aerate it. Otherwise, keep covered.

Baking Day

This is one day after you started if you used extra yeast to speed it up. Otherwise, it will be 3 days after you started. 

Add:

4½ cups whole grain cereal
1 tsp salt

2/3 cup raw sunflower seeds

1/3 cup whole flax seed

Add remaining ingredients and blend completely. Dough will be very different from regular bread dough - mixable with a strong wooden spoon or heavy duty spatula. Do not knead. Divide it evenly into two bowls. I use matching bowls and a digital scale to divide it. Press each dough down into a solid mass. Re-cover and let it sit for an hour or two.

The dough will be more solid after sitting but still sticky. To make it easier to transfer to bread pans, coat it with rolled oats all around as shown below. You can also use sesame seeds. 

Coat sticky dough with rolled oats

• Sprinkle the top and sides with rolled oats.

• Tilt the bowl, work the dough away from the side with a spatula, and sprinkle more oats where the dough came away from the bowl. Rotate the bowl and repeat the tilting and sprinkling until the dough is coated with oats all around. Gently press the oats onto the dough with the spatula. 

• Sprinkle oats onto your work surface and turn the dough out.

• Roll the dough onto the parchment paper and shape it into a loaf. 

Lift dough by the parchment paper and plop it into the bread pan. Make sure there are oats covering the dough at the ends, especially if you aren't using a non-stick bread pan. Parchment paper is oven safe. 

Put rolled oats on the end of the dough where it touches the pan

Press the dough from the middle toward the ends of the pan to even it out and score it with one or two knife cuts about a half inch deep. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F and then 60 to 75 minutes at 250 F. The internal temperature should be about 88 Celsius if you have an instant read thermometer.

Remove bread from pans, remove parchment paper, and cover loaves with a couple layers of kitchen cloths or put in paper bags for a couple hours. Put in plastic bags before they’re completely cool so they don’t dry out too much. They freeze well.

This is a pretty non-mainstream bread but fortunately, you can buy the bakery version before baking it yourself. Look for the small rectangular package in the international section of your grocery store. If you like that, its even better home baked. If you try my recipe, I'd love to see your comments below.

Freshly baked Ultragrain

Let cool before slicing.

Toasted and brushed with olive oil, it's ultra delicious! 

"A week of walking around Greve in Chianti", a guidebook

The guidebook we used 10 years ago

The first two times my wife and I came to Chianti to go walking (2001 and 2009), we brought the best guidebook we could find - Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria by James Lasdun and Pia Davis. We call it "WETU".

Has problems but still recommended

WETU has good general travel information and describes 29 walks in Tuscany and Umbria. If you want to go walking in that part of Italy, you should buy it because there's nothing else like it. However, the latest version (2004) is getting old and its maps are small scale line drawings (see comparisons below). On our first trips to Chianti we stayed in Radda and Greve and used it but we had some difficulty following the directions. Also, like most guidebooks, the walks in WETU are widely dispersed and therefore are not conducive to an extended walking holiday unless you have a car.

A map from WETU showing the one walk that connects with Greve
Scale on page is about 1:400,000

When we're on holiday, my wife and I like to rent an apartment for a week or two and go walking every day. For us, having a home base for a while and not using a car is the most relaxing kind of holiday and it allows us to get to know an area. Greve is one of our favourite places but the WETU guidebook has only one walk that starts or finishes there. By the time we'd made three trips to Greve, we had found lots of great walks that we could access on foot. I described our method of finding walks here:
https://iberianpixels.blogspot.com/2015/11/our-customized-walks-in-tuscany.html

After our walking experience around Greve, I jokingly said that I should write a guidebook. The idea simmered for a while, I turned it into a project, and finished it this spring. It's available as a PDF file at https://www.walkintuscany.ca for $15 (Canadian).

The guidebook I wish we had 10 years ago

Some special things about my guide:

• All of the walks are around the town of Greve so it's perfect for an extended stay there.
• The included maps have a very large scale (about 1:12,000 when printed). 
• The zip download includes GPS track files for all the routes so you can navigate on your dedicated GPS device or smartphone, with a suitable app.

Here's an overview of the walks.  Greve is at the centre.

Eight walks from 7 to 19 km.

My guidebook includes text descriptions and large scale maps of each walk. You can print whichever pages you want. If you know how to use a recreational GPS (e.g. a Garmin handheld or an appropriate app on your phone) you'll have an even better way to navigate the routes because you have the tracks as GPX files.

The routes in my guide do not follow dedicated recreational trails but rather a combination of quiet paved roads, gravel roads, four wheel drive roads, farm tracks, and foot trails. There are unmarked junctions where you have to pay attention to the maps and directions. Adventurous walkers who like to explore will actually find this an advantage but it makes good maps essential. That's where the maps in my guide (and the GPS option) really stands out. Here's a comparison of a map in WETU and a map of the same route in my guide.

Part of a map from WETU (upper left corner of the page shown above). 

Part of a map of the same route from my guide. 

I don't want to be too critical but my maps are much better than those in WETU. Even more dramatic is the exceptional quality of maps that are available if you purchase the GPS app that I use on my iPhone. It's called MotionX GPS and it's only $1.99 US. I have no connection with it other than being a user. It's a bit quirky but the downloadable maps that can be used offline are awesome! Here's a picture of my iPhone screen showing the same area as that in the two previous examples. The red line is one of my GPX files and the background is the downloaded MotionX terrain map.

To emphasize the amount of detail that's available on these maps, here's one more screenshot of MotionX after zooming in to the switchbacks around the Greve Cemetery (left of centre in the above image). The track is turned off to show the underlying map. 

Greve is a beautiful town with all the shops and restaurants we could ask for. It has an excellent weekly market in the piazza and wineries and agritourism establishments within walking distance.

I'd like to end on a positive note about WETU, by Lasdun and Davis. You should get it even if only  for their good writing about history, geography, food, and practical information about Tuscany and Umbria. However, if you want to do any walking around Greve, I'd also recommend my guidebook!

Montefioralle in autumn, an easy 30 minute walk from Greve