5 replies to this topic

[Wholemeal Crank]

One of my favorite bread recipes from Flatbreads and Flavors is Nane Casoke, or bulgur bread. You take some bulgur, soak it in 2 parts boiling water with a bit of salt and chopped onion for 30 minutes, mix that with flour to make a workable dough, and then roll out thin breads (as thin as you can get given that the bulgur won't flatten too much) and bake directly on stones or bricks in the oven. I bake them to a soft chewy texture, and they're lovely with soups, cheese, even applesauce.

Today I'm wondering how they might taste with other grains substituted for the wheat, and that brings up the question: how to prepare another grain to function like the bulgur in this recipe? Would it work to just start with rice or barley or quinoa cooked to 'normal' eating texture, or is there anything else special about bulgur processing that might be important to the final result?

[Wholemeal Crank]

Just in case someone makes the mistake of trying to follow my notes above as a recipe, I need to make a correction--it's 1 part boiling water to 1 part bulgur.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

I'd be leery of trying whole barley, but if you can get cracked barley you should be able to treat it exactly as you would the bulgur, right down to the soak in boiling water. I'd also be aware that barley used in this context is a bit bitter, and you might want to adjust/add sugar to the recipe accordingly. I'd try it with small batches; I've found that cracked barley will rehydrate, but your results may vary.

Quinua should definitely be cooked first - I like my rice cooker for this, since it never overcooks my grains. Simply soaking it won't soften the seed coatings sufficiently (I found this out the hard way when experimenting with the grain for my multigrain breads. It won't even soften with more than 3 hours in slack dough.) Rice is likely the same thing.

One thing that might be interesting to try are cracked sorghum or buckwheat groats.... Oooh, now I have to go experiment!

[Wholemeal Crank]

Today, I've set up some amaranth in the rice cooker as a first experiment, and we'll see how it goes.

I know bulgur is precooked, so I assume whatever grain I put in should also be precooked, but especially with barley or oats, am wondering how to get a cracked-equivalent texture to the cooked grain: assuming now that the food processor will risk pureeing a fully cooked soft grain, but it would be pretty awkward to have to cook, dry, then attempt to break up the grain too.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

With quinua and amaranth, the natural explosion of the grains as they cook should provide you the exact texture you're after; with barley it's why I suggested looking for grains that are cracked to begin with.

You could also experiment with parboiling the cracked barley/oats and drying the result - then you'll have the barley/oat equivalent of bulgur which you can then treat the same way.

[Wholemeal Crank]

Slow to get around to the reply: the amaranth did a lovely job in this recipe. It's easily as good as the bulgur, and should be a nice way to get a little more grain variety into my diet.