Becoming Bread-Self-Sufficient#

Bread. It's the staff of life. And right down there on the bottom layer of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, in amongst the other purely physiological staffs like water, air, sleep and sex.

For bread-making here is Mike's Hierarchy of Bread Eating Self-Sufficiency:

Bread making as your regular and usual way of obtaining the bread you eat.#

This is the foundation layer of the Pyramid. You need to get this one right before bothering with the other, higher levels. Note that I say "regular" and "usual". There's no problem with buying the occasional special loaf of 5-Grain Rye or a Baguette for a change of pace; self-sufficiency is meant to be fun, not a stick to beat yourself with. But your first step in getting self-sufficient with bread is to be (largely) baking your own. Indeed, since bread is such a basic staple for most people in most cultures, I'd go as far as to say that becoming Bread Independent is a major step down the path towards self-sufficient living.

Almost certainly your bread will be made using store-bought flour. And so it should be! Initially. Take one step at a time.

Using standard "industrial" flours will remove at least one major variable from the bread-making process, and will help to ensure your success in the initial stages where you're not terribly certain of the smells, flavours, textures and processes of handraulic bread-making.

As you might expect, the flavour of home-baked bread is far nicer than almost anything you can buy. What might surprise you, though, is that home-made bread has far, far superior keeping properties than store-bought. I am still puzzled by this, since factory-made breads are generally stuffed with preservatives to ensure long shelf-life in the supermarkets. Not that it's needed much, I would think. But home-made bread simply lasts longer. We've had loaves lasting upwards of ten days, and still good to eat, if not quite as fresh as when they emerged from the oven.

Developing your own Sourdough Starter#

Becoming independent of Factory Yeast.

After a good long while of making our own bread, a thought occurred to me. It's pretty easy to see how we can go further in this Bread Self-Sufficiency effort by growing our own grain. Uncle John goes into some detail on this topic, and we're familiar with growing stuff in general. But what happens if the day comes when we're no longer conveniently able to buy yeast?

So we started on the journey up the pyramid to becoming Yeast Self-Sufficient. I'll describe the process of initiating and maintaining your own Sourdough Starter on another page; suffice to say here that we have been using the same sourdough yeast culture for several years, now. Along the way it has developed its own unique flavour and characteristics, and has mutated substantially from the rather bland tasting product it started out as.

With the rebuilding of our Brewery and subsequent Homebrewing efforts we now have a whole lot more yeast to play with, since beer and bread yeasts are merely different strains of the same organisms. We're still really only maintaining the single bread-yeast strain, though. You might be more adventurous and want to develop several different starters suited to different kinds of bread. Start your own yeast library!

Goodbye to Factory Flour#

Milling your own.

This is a significant step, because it takes some investment. You need to acquire a flour-mill. There are numerous options: steel plates, burrs or stone? Hand-cranked or motorised? Limited as we are by local suppliers, and constrained by the economics of shipping a relatively heavy item from overseas (hence terribly expensive shipping) we eventually lucked into a semi-antique grain mill that we found whilst on a trip down to Gansbaai.

Now, "Stone Ground" might sound all cottagey and back-to-the-land-ish, but I'm told that it can also mean "bits of stone, broken teeth and expensive dentistry" though this is much less common with modern artificial stones than in times of old. I cannot speak from experience of how stone-grinding might alter the flavour of flour. Nor can I speak with authority of how the faster and admittedly less labour intensive motorised mills might affect the flour. My research indicates that the chief hazard in milling flour is heating the flour whilst grinding, which results in flavour changes and significant loss of nutrients. We've not had that opportunity, with our hand-cranked mill.

I can state, though, that the labour-saving cannot be terribly great. To mill sufficient flour for a normal-sized loaf - 450g of flour - takes but a few minutes. Perhaps 3 to 5 minutes, and it is no great effort. If I had a motorised mill, I'd probably have to spend as long setting it up and cleaning it off afterwards. So count me skeptical of any time and effort savings unless you have a significantly greater number of mouths to fill. With just two of us home these days a loaf lasts us a week.

We have learned that milling grains is easier if tackled in stages. The first pass through the mill is with the grinding plates set quite loose, and merely serves to break the grains into small bits. These are then ground once again with the plates set much "tighter", and you end up with a mixture containing quite fine flour, together with some bran and coarser bits. Sift the flour out, and throw the rest back through the mill for another pass, this time with the plates set as tight as is comfortable to turn. After this the bran remains constitute only a small proportion of the flour, and it's your choice whether to sift them out or keep them in the bread-flour.

The flour you produce is completely different from any bought flour, even "Whole Grain" flours. Commercial grain mills produce "Whole Grain" flours by first taking the grain apart into all its myriad constituents, sifting, grinding and bleaching as they deem necessary, adding various mysterious additives to enhance shelf-life, "customer acceptability", pest-resistance and nutrition (since they've taken all the original nutrition out in the process) and then they put some bits back together in proportions designed to maximise their profits. I have all this in good authority from a man who was actually the CEO of such an industrial mill.

Your own home-ground flour is truly whole grain. Nothing added. Nothing removed besides, perhaps, a little of the bran.

The colour is much darker, the texture rougher and uneven. Dough made with this flour is heavier and takes a bit longer to absorb more moisture than you're used to from your previous bread-baking experiences. And the flavour is... mmmmmmm...

I've tried to take care, in writing all this, to avoid speaking of milling Wheat, preferring to talk more generically about milling "Grains." I'd encourage you to explore using other grains, whether mixed in with your Wheat flour, or on their own. We've recently been on a Barley-bread binge, and Barley breads are simply delicious.

The only potential difficulty - especially if you live in a city - might be in obtaining whole grains in the first place. We are fortunate in living close enough to a seed-supply store that sells most grains in quantities as small as 5kg. Now, buying in 50kg sacks would certainly work out a lot cheaper for us, but a doubt whether we could eat that much grain in any given couple of years, and by then the grain would be far from as fresh as we'd like.

Whatever quantities suit you best, though, I must emphasize that you need to pay good attention to storing your grains in air-tight, bug- and rodent-proof containers! And keep a wary and regular eye on the grain, even if it is in sealed bags. I've had a still-sealed bag of Wheat turn up full of weavils. One trick is to store sealed bags of grain in the freezer for a week or more when you first bring them home. This will kill any bugs or eggs present in the grain, and greatly assist in keeping grain pest-free.

Growing your own Grains#

he ultimate step in becoming Self-Raised.

Of course the best solution to the problem I raised above - that of actually finding a place to buy whole grains at reasonable prices - is solved once and for all time by simply growing your own. It's really not very difficult. If you can grow veggies successfully you should have no difficulty at all growing grains. As I write this we have only experimented with grains on a very limited scale, but this is the year we plan to scale that up. Way up.

I think that the only challenges in growing grains lie in the threshing and winnowing. And that can't be so very hard. Tim Peters has written a very nice article on small-scale grain cleaning and handling that I heartily recommend.

Onwards and Upwards#

Just as described by Abraham Maslow, each layer of the pyramid must be taken care of before one can ascend to the next level. First take care of the basics of baking. Then yeast. Then flour. Then grain. After all, milling your own wonderful flour doesn't make much sense if you're not able to bake it into a decent, tummy-filling and nutritious loaf.

Actually there is one possible further layer in the hierarchy of breadmaking: Developing your own varieties of various grains. But that takes us into the realms of plant-breeding and quite a way beyond the simple baking of bread. Some grains are quite easy to cross-pollinate and select from, so it is quite simple to develop your own varieties. Others - notably Wheat and Barley among them - require a considerable degree of technical expertise, not to mention many years of patient work, and is something much better tackled by an entire community of plant-breeders who share similar values and breeding goals. Certainly commercial plant-breeders' interests lie very far from ours as self-sufficient homesteaders.

Then, too, we've not touched on building a self-sufficient oven for baking the bread in. But that, too, falls a way outside the scope of actual "bread self-sufficiency." And this page is quite long enough already.

Happy baking!