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Cracked-Wheat Bread
October 4, 2011

by stacy
Published on: October 4, 2011
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“This is an interesting, crunchy, rather solid bread.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread

“This is the best whole-wheat bread I’ve ever had.”
-Mike

Last night I wanted to make some sandwich bread for the week.  Since I picked up some cracked wheat, or bulgur, on my last trip to the Linden Hills Co-op, I had everything on hand to make Cracked-Wheat Bread.

Here are the ingredients:

Cracked-Wheat Bread Ingredients

Cracked wheat has the the consistency of tiny pebbles.  Or, if you would rather compare your ingredients to other foods, it has the same texture as steel-cut oats.

In hindsight, I think that Beard wants you to bring 1 1/2 cups water to a boil, stir in the cracked wheat, and cook for 10 minutes.  Instead, I boiled 1 1/2 cup of water, poured it over my cracked wheat, and let it sit for 10 minutes.  The downside with my hands-off method is that all of the water wasn’t absorbed, as it was supposed to be according to the recipe.  I adjusted the amount of milk from 1 cup to 1/2 cup to account for the  unabsorbed water from the Stacy Method, and my dough seemed to be the right consistency.  However, I did have to knead in about 1/2 cup of extra flour, so I may have still ended up with too much liquid.

Regardless, my dough rose nicely and I shaped it into two loaves to fit my 9 x 5 pans.  After another hour of rising, the loaves were ready for the oven.

Cracked-Wheat Bread After Second Rising

I checked on the bread after baking for 20 minutes at 375 degrees, and the loaves were already done.  They smelled so marvelous that I had to try a slice.

Cracked-Wheat Bread

Cracked-Wheat Bread is by far the best whole-wheat bread I’ve made so far.  The texture is absolutely amazing: light and fluffy, with a bit of crunch here and there from the cracked wheat.  The flavor is hearty without being overwhelmingly dense.  Whatever mistakes I made cooking the cracked wheat paid off–the resulting loaves were incredible.

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