Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a “wet-grind” method that my wife suggested one morning. I soak wheat berries for about 8-12 hours at 160% hydration. Then I just blenderize the heck out of them in the vitamix.
I’ve had consistently good results with for 50% berry and 50% flour breads (basically 80% hydration dough), though I have had decent attempts all the way to 75% wheat berry loaves (admittedly it took a few tries to figure out how to fold such wet dough!).
The other day I found some chia seeds in the fridge. In the past, I’ve noticed they soak up an incredible amount of water (at least 4x their weight) so I thought I’d go all wheat berries this time:
200g Berries soaked in
320g water for about half a day. After blending, mix in
100g starter (100% hydrated)
With the starter, this is a 148% hydration dough.
40g chia seeds, soaking up an +/- equivalent of 160g water, resulting in an equivalent to about 72% hydration – an almost dryish loaf!
4g salt, don’t forget your salt.
And yeah it worked out really well, the oven spring wasn’t amazing (I don’t think I proofed long enough) but this was most likely the best tasting loaf so far this year.
Plus, with flour being so rare at this time, I think I’ll be doing this 100% wet wheat berry grind method for a while coming up.
Have fun!
