After breaking both an estate sale coffee grinder in less than five minutes and a state of the art $50 Braun spice grinder on our tenacious wheat berries, this weekend Rashmi's folks offered us their circa 1970 Sears' blender. "We
have a blender," I thought to myself. But we nonetheless took their relic back to Tuscaloosa. I gave it a shot the other morning, and to my surprise the Sears and Roebuck beat out that fancy German engineering. I thought for sure that we'd done a number on those wheat berries. They were ground fine with just a little bit of grit to them. So, coming off two weeks with no bread, I decided to make pizza. Using a simple pizza dough recipe I put all the dry ingredients in the bowl of my mixer and started to add the water. I could tell as the water hit the wheat that it wasn't going to work. That grit I had hoped would disappear instead showed up as big unprocessed flakes of the wheat berry. Even though I could see some of the strands forming in the bread as I kneaded the dough, I could tell that this sucker wasn't going to rise. A couple of hours later it sat there in the bowl, a lifeless inert hunk of wet partially ground wheat berries. So our first food disaster was upon us. I scrapped the pizza idea, but decided to cook the bread the same way on a pizza stone. I rolled it out a second time to rise and still nothing. So here it is, in all it's glory. My failed Alabama pizza dough that tastes pretty good but has the consistency of a brick. Not too bad heated up with a little jelly. That's the thing about being hungry - you even eat your failures.
After breaking both an estate sale coffee grinder in less than five minutes and a state of the art $50 Braun spice grinder on our tenacious wheat berries, this weekend Rashmi's folks offered us their circa 1970 Sears' blender. "We have a blender," I thought to myself. But we nonetheless took their relic back to Tuscaloosa. I gave it a shot the other morning, and to my surprise the Sears and Roebuck beat out that fancy German engineering. I thought for sure that we'd done a number on those wheat berries. They were ground fine with just a little bit of grit to them. So, coming off two weeks with no bread, I decided to make pizza. Using a simple pizza dough recipe I put all the dry ingredients in the bowl of my mixer and started to add the water. I could tell as the water hit the wheat that it wasn't going to work. That grit I had hoped would disappear instead showed up as big unprocessed flakes of the wheat berry. Even though I could see some of the strands forming in the bread as I kneaded the dough, I could tell that this sucker wasn't going to rise. A couple of hours later it sat there in the bowl, a lifeless inert hunk of wet partially ground wheat berries. So our first food disaster was upon us. I scrapped the pizza idea, but decided to cook the bread the same way on a pizza stone. I rolled it out a second time to rise and still nothing. So here it is, in all it's glory. My failed Alabama pizza dough that tastes pretty good but has the consistency of a brick. Not too bad heated up with a little jelly. That's the thing about being hungry - you even eat your failures.
3 comments:
This is a time-consuming idea but what if you sifted out the chunks and re-blended them...
We love reading your blog, I am hoping that at the very least all of your work will help us find local stuff easier... we are going to give it a shot when we move back to Birmingham.
Jessica Garrison
I did try that, but my flour sifter just wouldn't cut it. The chunks were big enough to sift out, but the blender won't get them much smaller. I think it's a grain mill, like the $260 Nutrimill, that we'll have to invest in before we see some risen bread around here.
I should make a post called "the corn tortilla that never was"!
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