Here is Part 1 of this moist and creamy bread experiment. Enjoy!

Basic Information

The more and more I bake and cook in our kitchen the more forgetful I am about what I did or how I made a certain dish or bread. I attempted to create a recipe and actually measure some ingredients this time in order to duplicate the creamy and moist bread I made in this actual post (as well as this bread post) and day.

So I will give some basic cooking notes below on what information and photos I took of this evening of baking.

Baking Notes

425 degrees for 18 minutes

Whole Grains

Organic spelt berries

Organic barley

Whole Grain Ratio

1:1

2 cups spelt grain

2 cups barley grain

Baking Dish

Round pizza stones

Stoneware bar pan

Bread Photos Galore

Now on to one of my favorite parts of cooking food (second to eating and serving them) are the many food pictures I take for our Family Food and Recipe Journal.

When I worked this dough with my hands it felt like the sweet soft and creamy Japanese mochi I loved to eat as a child. The bread dough reminded me of soft mocha ready to eat.

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Satisfying a Healthy Craving

I have been craving a moist and fluffy, light and airy “melt-in your-mouth” whole grain bread for a week now. We use many different methods of making bread and my experiments will end up in variations of flat bread, pizza, scones, biscuits, crackers, piecrust cookies, mini loaves, breadsticks or something else.

I love sharing what I’ve learned in the process and am still learning about using whole grains. Though it’s been about eight years now or so we continue to learn so much about using a variety of organic whole grains.

Enjoy Experimenting in the Kitchen

The hard part of sharing all of this information is that I mostly cook without a recipe. I encourage you to do the same! It is such a great accomplishment to know that you can make almost anything you are craving to eat while saving money and feeding your family a healthy nutritious treat.

I like to label things as an “experiment.” It is that because I am often busier with other things in the home like homeschooling, the art of homemaking, and spending time with my family outdoors. Though I like to “throw” things together I am working on making easier-to-follow directions and recipe lists along with video clips to help you learn how to cook using whole grains.

More Additions to Food Picture Journal

In the meantime, enjoy the extra bits of information and food pictures I love to take. These pictures are part of my personal Food Picture Journal and Food Picture Library.

May you be inspired to use real, fresh food and find out how amazing it tastes and how good it makes you feel!

To be continued…

Bread Photos Sneak Peek

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I wrote this for The Homeschool Lounge back in September 9, 2009. Though this calls for soaked dough, I have still been using unsoaked grain recipes also as we continue to do research.

Feel free to search the website for other pizza-making methods using whole grains. Enjoy making pizza!

I love making pizza. It’s so much fun to feel the dough in your hands and roll or stretch it to form a nice foundation. The best part of all is eating it and hopefully having leftovers for the next day to give yourself a break. That extra time is nice to do other duties while also enjoying a meal that tastes good heated up or cold.

I love how you can be on a tight budget while still making pizza or add extra nutrients by adding a variety of toppings. The ability to control all your ingredients makes it not only healthy by eliminating toxic things for your body but also providing something nourishing, wholesome, and energizing.

I am not a pizza expert but I enjoy sharing what tastes good on our family table. May it be helpful to another cook here!

Part 1: The Dough or Pizza Crust

I have made many yeasted pizza dough crusts and those have been delicious. During the beginning of this pregnancy I felt a significant difference in eating grains that were soaked. It hasn’t been an easy process but we are slowly getting there.

So last night I made pizza crust from our dough that had been soaking overnight. We milled spelt berries the day before to make our dough and used part of Sally Fallon’s Yeasted Buttermilk Bread Recipe from her Nourishing Traditions Cookbook. We only used the soaking portion which asks for freshly ground flour, buttermilk, and melted butter.

The dough was soaked enough that we didn’t need any unbleached flour that she calls for the following day because it’s so wet. Our dough was nice, pliable, and wonderful to roll with only adding a little flour for rolling. You can use a fat for that too if you’d rather omit dusting flour.

We made a double batch. With this recipe, we made 2 large pizzas, 1 medium, and two kid-sized ones that our daughters made. We had enough for some leftovers today.

After rolling out my dough, I placed it on my pizza stones and folded in the edges once around and then again to seal it in. Then I added my sauce and ingredients.
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Craving

I had been craving a good apple turnover that was not only delicious but also good for me and my family.

Since I don’t have much organic hard red winter wheat berries left to make fresh whole wheat flour I decided to use our organic barley grains instead.  It is more inexpensive (also see the book of Revelation in the Bible) and in ancient times was known as soldier food.

This morning was the morning we got to satisfy that craving while also eating a different type of breakfast for a change.

The Food Making Experiment

We like experiments in our household, especially ones that deal with food.  I have to come up with different random recipes because of the variety of whole grains we use.  I like experimenting with different whole grains and seeing how they taste and react to different cooking methods.

Since our fresh barley flour has been tasting pretty good for most pastry-like recipes (and also mixed with spelt with some yummy olive oil dipping breads), I thought it would be safe to use it for our turnover dough.
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I wrote this for The Homeschool Lounge back in September 2009.

Your oats can be stretched further when you decide to bake them instead of making hot cereal. Soaking grains is better for your body and it’s easy enough to prepare that you won’t be wondering what will be for breakfast.

If you consume cereals of any sort (except homemade) even if it is labeled organic, I highly recommend during some research. We stopped eating cereal more than two years ago in our household. It not only saves you a lot of money but also from eventually weakening your and your family’s bodies. One good place to start doing research is by obtaining or borrowing a copy of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions Cookbook. It has so many references to other studies and books throughout the book and on the sides of the recipes. If you like science I think you’ll be amazed to find out the studies done where cereal and other “foods” were involved. You might see a link with humans. Ever since I was little girl I always enjoyed studying about the how’s and why’s of things and mostly wasn’t satisfied when I was told something was good for me. I wanted to know more of the why behind it. I guess that’s why I was attracted to physics in college. I love seeing the power of God through the things that He has put on this earth for our betterment, from the amazing properties of cotton, bamboo, silver, food — you name it. I get excited learning about it because it shows me His awesome power.

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I wrote this for The Homeschool Lounge back in February 2010.

Why spend over twelve to eighteen dollars paying for a small main entree of salmon when you can spend that money feeding four people close to the same thing?

Resist the urge to eat out and drop by your local fish store instead. Get some good healthy cuts of wild salmon. Take that home to bake that day or the next.

Making this succulent dish is really easy. I’ve learned how to marinate salmon in good olive oils, juices, and spices but this method doesn’t need as much early preparation. In fact, the fish goes straight from the bag to the skillet.

This recipe is inspired by Sally Fallon’s salmon recipes in her cookbook Nourishing Traditions. I’ve changed some things but the general concept is still the same.

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I spotted one of our breakfast or brunch meals from August 2010 that had organic jasmine rice, organic stir fry vegetables, organic scrambled eggs, and organic bacon. If I could do this dish all over again, I would most likely use organic brown rice (basmati preferably) and use a different meat.

Find out more about these organic stir fry vegetables and how they were cooked here.

This is quick and easy vegetable dish to make. I sliced organic red onions, celery, and baby bok choy all about the same width and thickness and sautéing them in a cast iron skillet, using organic extra virgin coconut oil as my cooking fat. Season with good quality sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Learn how I used this vegetable side dish with other types of food for our meal by going here.

These nice round loaves of bread were made using organic whole grains that were freshly milled in our home using our Country Living Grain Mill. They were hand mixed, hand formed, and baked in round stoneware from Pampered Chef.

Since spelt is our favorite grain to use in baking and bread-type foods, we most likely used that here.

I remember writing a post about this photo about a few years ago when we used to post our recipes on another website of ours. I am trying to locate it. If it is still available, I look forward to posting what was written about it.

I remember using freshly mashed ripened bananas for this recipe along with fresh strawberries and organic flour that was freshly milled in our grain mill. I am almost positive that I used extra virgin olive oil as my cooking fat and aluminum-free baking powder and grey celtic sea salt.

I can also see the organic millet I added to these muffins. I’m not sure if I added walnuts to the homemade batter but that would give it a nice bite if we wanted something different from just fluffy, moist, and creamy. The sweetener was most likely honey and I used anywhere between one to two eggs in the mix.

It was moist and delicious and I enjoyed taking those photos.

Picture note
I just found the time that I downloaded this food photo and it was around October 2007.May you be inspired to be creative at home!

For God’s glory,